PHOTOGRAPHY & ART DIRECTION

WOVEN ARCHITECTURE

 

Photographer FRENCH COWBOY

A Julien Crouïgneau & Mia Macfarlane Creation

​​

 

Series by the photo duo Mia Macfarlane and Julien Crouigneau, also known as French Cowboy, Woven Architecture brings together three living presences: two Sri Lankan models, the textile traditions of Sri Lanka, and the ocean-facing architecture of Shigeru Ban.

​

 

Shot at Villa Vista, Shigeru Ban’s remarkable house on the southern coast of Sri Lanka, the series treats architecture not as a backdrop, but as a third muse. Its frames, balconies, voids, and open views become part of the choreography. Fabric moves through the space like breath. Bodies stretch, disappear, fly, fall, and resist. The sea and sky become extensions of the image.

 

The textiles were created by Selyn, Sri Lanka’s fair-trade handloom company, whose work supports women artisans, fair wages, and social initiatives through the Selyn Foundation. Their fabrics carry more than colour and texture. They carry labour, care, economic independence, and the hands of women whose craft becomes part of the visual language of the series.

 

At the centre of the work are two Sri Lankan models, including Sean, one of the few openly LGBTQ models in Sri Lanka. In a country where same-sex intimacy remains criminalised, visibility itself becomes a form of risk. For this reason, the images are not only about beauty. They are about the cost of being seen.

​

 

In one photograph, Sean is wrapped in red ribbons. The image refers to menstruation, bleeding, and the work of Selyn Foundation’s #BleedGood initiative, which supports girls and women living with period poverty through reusable fabric sanitary pads. Yet the red also speaks to another kind of wound: the personal cost of freedom, the sacrifice involved in standing openly inside one’s identity, and the violence of a society that asks certain people to hide their identity.

​

 

Throughout the series, fabric becomes a language of both protection and release. It binds, shelters, lifts, and escapes. A figure appears to fly toward the ocean. Another rises toward the sky. In one image, the head disappears while fabric extends upward to the second-floor balcony, transforming the body into a column, a banner, a signal.

​

 

Woven Architecture is a meeting point between Sri Lankan textile craft, queer visibility, women’s work, and architectural space. It is also a portrait of freedom under pressure. The series asks what it means to inhabit a body, a country, a gender, a fabric, a building, and a future when not all forms of existence are equally protected.

​

 

It is a love letter to Sri Lanka, but not a decorative one. It honours the beauty of the island while acknowledging the social realities carried beneath the surface. Like woven cloth, the images are made of many threads: ocean, body, cotton, blood, architecture, resistance, and light.