For The Armory Show 2026, Pauline Guerrier presents The Guardians of the World, a body of work bringing together straw marquetry, embroidery, block printing, and watercolor. Developed through years of travel and research—and shaped by recent institutional residencies in India and Mexico—the presentation continues Guerrier’s exploration of ritual, craft, adornment, and the relationship between the human body and the natural world.

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Guerrier has worked with straw marquetry since 2018, drawn to both its simplicity and symbolic resonance. Wheat and rye straw are closely tied to the history of human sustenance, cultivation, and the rhythm of the seasons. Each stalk is dyed, split, flattened, cut, and applied to wood fragment by fragment, transforming an ordinary agricultural material into a luminous surface.

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Alongside straw marquetry, Guerrier works across a wide range of artisanal techniques. In India, as a laureate of Villa Swagatam at the Kalhath Institute in Lucknow, she deepened her engagement with textile traditions, watercolor, and block printing. More recently, through Inmersiones Creativas México–Francia, her research in Mexico has brought her into dialogue with Maya women artisans from Chiapas and with forms of making through which memory and knowledge are carried across generations.

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Travel is central to Guerrier’s process. Through drawing, she has built a visual repertoire of costumes, adornments, masks, and ritual figures encountered in India, Benin, Mexico, Chile, and Morocco. She is particularly drawn to ceremonial forms connected to fertility, the changing of the seasons, protection, and balance between human beings and nature. Rather than reproducing any one tradition, she brings together fragments and visual echoes from different places, creating hybrid figures that feel both familiar and imagined.

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The title Parure—referring to adornment or an ensemble worn on the body—becomes especially significant in the new textile works, where costume functions as a language through which the body can be transformed, concealed, protected, or given another identity.

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The smaller Guardian of the World watercolors function as studies in which figures, colors, costumes, and symbols first emerge before migrating into different materials and scales. A form painted in watercolor may later reappear in wool and linen, block printing, or straw marquetry. Across these shifts in medium, Guerrier’s process remains consistent: from observed ritual to drawing, and from drawing to material. In The Guardians of the World, craft becomes a living form of transmission through which gestures, symbols, and beliefs continue to travel and transform.