Myrlande Constant

Myrlande Constant (born 1968, Port-au-Prince) is a Haitian textile artist who specializes in Vodou themed flags, or drapo Vodou. Since she began making Vodou flags in the 1990s, she has transformed and surpassed this medium, preferring to make large-scale tableau, she describes her work as "painting with beads."

Myrlande constant works in her studio/home, which is located on top of a hill, surrounded by glass-less windows, this is, perhaps, the perfect setting for her flags, which undulate as the wind makes its way into the rooms.

Myrlande constant worked in a wedding dress factory with her mother. After her employers didn’t pay her for her labor, she opposed them and left her job, taking as a severance pay bags with beads and knowledge. She used the sewing and beading skills learned at the factory (the technique used there is called tambour and was developed in france) and started working on her flags. As a result of those situations, in the early 1990’s, myrlande constant became the first woman in haiti to apply the tambour technique in her work, which could be seen as a re-consideration of the making of traditional voudou flags. Moreover, the use of the tambour as a way of building her work, which populated her flags with what at the time were considered as feminine adornments, charged her work with gender.

Excerpt from text by Diego Singh