Valérie casts objects in sticky wet tissue paper and when the paper dries, what she peels off carries the form and marks of the original, only it is colourless and weightless. Contrary to traditional sculpture where a mould must be made to create the sculpture, it is the object itself that she uses as a mould. This technique enables her not only to capture, almost literally in the sense of “stealing”, all the details of the original object she chooses to cast, but also to capture the « space of the object in space » at a certain moment in time.

Her work deals with the ideas of impermanence, of presence/absence. It questions the nature of things, of what is reality or perceived as such. She is interested by phenomenology of perception, by the power of what a trace can trigger in our memory or our imagination. The skin-like texture of her sculptures also enable her to explore the concept of liminality, the frontier between inside/outside, full/empty…

Her sculptures are like a trace, a vaporous evocation of the original. They make reference to real objects that exist somewhere else or have existed in a different time. They could either be an apparition or in the process of vanishing.

They strive to achieve the impossible, to inhabit the space between spaces, the threshold between inside and outside, presence and absence, visible and invisible, material and immaterial, reality and memory, reality and dream. Valérie is strongly inspired by the notion of the ‘infra thin’, a strange and poetic concept invented and developed by Marcel Duchamp. Impossible to define, infra thin is a kind of immeasurable difference or separation between two seemingly identical things. According to Duchamp, this partition is virtually imperceptible, but absolute. Examples of the infra thin include an object at one time and then one second later, the warmth of a seat that has just been left, or the space between recto and verso…

As she materialises the tiny interstice that lies between the object and the negative space around it, Valérie likes to believe that she materialises Marcel Duchamp’s infra thin.

She sometimes cover the surface of her tissue paper casts with pencil strokes, creating a three-dimensional drawing, as if she had sculpted the paper with the mark making. In other instances she uses photography to further challenge the realness of the object. In that case she destroys the sculpture and the photograph is the final piece. Thus the photograph is like the ‘trace of the trace’. We are left uncertain as to the true nature of the final image, just as we are uncertain as to the true nature of reality.

She has also been developing a more abstract body of work with her light sculptures. She creates geometric forms with cardboard or timber, which she then casts in tissue paper and lights from the inside. The light reveals the intriguing skin-like texture of the paper. ‘Monument to Flavin’ is a twist on Dan Flavin’s ‘Monument to Tatlin’ series he made between 1964 and 1982- instead of the neon tubes he used, Valerie creates similar forms but with the neon tubes’ cardboard packaging, which she then casts in silk paper and lights up with led strips.

She sometimes mixes the lit paper casts with other materials such as stone. ‘Equations of Equilibrium’ are made with pieces of found rubble from a demolished house. In the ‘Geometries’ series, graphic geometric paper casts intertwine with the more organic forms of natural stones, furthermore enhancing the contrast between the sensuality of the lit paper and the rough minerality of the stone…