Born near the banks of the Mekong River in Vietnam, Kathy Le Vavasseur now lives and works in Paris. Her protean work has been marked by her triple culture – French, Italian and Vietnamese – and invokes the question of identity through sculpture, weaving and installations. A graduate of the École Supérieure d’Art Textile Françoise Conte in Paris, she was trained by master ceramists and glassmakers. Clay is her preferred material.
Using the symbolism of fluidity, her work diverts techniques and materials from their primary function, intertwining, deforming and superimposing elements, and playing on relationships between form, material and scale. Shapes break and curve, creating light, elongated structures.
Working from form to subject and from subject to series, she gives movement to clay at the point of contact between air and water, using the nerikomi technique to create layers and playing on the paradox between a fluid form and a dense yet fragile base.
Her minimalist, organic works tend to avoid any ordinary expression of the body. In such installations as “Translocation,” “Orogeny,” “Neuron” and “Genesis,” the human is evoked through symbols borrowed from science. Since 2003, she has participated in some 30 exhibitions.
Visit Kathy Le Vavasseur’s website and Instagram page.
Featured work
Selected works, 2013-2021
Kathy Le Vavasseur believes in diversity, even in her work, in which she often uses a variety of techniques.
A graduate of the Ecole Supérieure d’Art Françoise Conte in Paris, she explores different disciplines and sensitively uses a mix of techniques – painting, textiles, glass and clay – to express herself through her art in a spirit of audacity and freedom.
Trained by masters in artistic ceramics and glassmaking, she believes that technical knowledge opens the way to infinite creativity. Far from being a prisoner of technique, she often frees herself from it to divert materials from their original function.
A heavy material, for example, might seem as light as air or be twisted to the breaking point.
Kathy Le Vavasseur’s work brings vital impulses to life through clay and glass. The rippling forms evoke water, while the more structured or organic shapes speak of the origins of life. The former stem from her visual memory, the latter from the depths of her consciousness.
Her totem sculptures and wall installations pay tribute to the sacred elements: water, winds, the body, DNA.
