• Enigmatic female figures, suspended between fragility and sovereignty •

Artist statement

At the crossroads of sculpture and illustration, I create female portraits infused with surrealism and romanticism. Influenced by classical painting, comics, cinema, animation, and literature, my work emerges from a dialogue between multiple visual and narrative worlds.
Drawing from the aesthetics of the cabinet of curiosities, I conceive my sculptures as fragments of stories, oscillating between imagined eras and baroque or Victorian influences. Through posture, gaze, costume, and color, I suggest narratives without fully defining them, leaving the viewer free to interpret and inhabit them.

Inspired by fairy tales, my figures evolve toward more ambivalent territories, where idealism and disillusion coexist. I explore a vision of femininity that is both fragile and powerful, where inner tensions and fractures become part of their presence. The marvelous becomes a space of transformation: a way to sublimate a more troubled reality and offer these characters a form of emancipation.

Bio

Ornélie is a French artist born in 1983, working at the boundary between reality and imagination. She studied at Gobelins School in Paris and began her career in animation, working on internationally acclaimed feature films. This experience, rooted in character creation and volume storytelling, naturally led her toward sculpture.

Primarily self-taught, she develops narrative sculptural forms where the female figure becomes a space of projection, tension, and adaptation. Her work has received several international awards, including the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize and the Art Renewal Center Award, and has been featured in numerous publications.