Kathy Le Vavasseur - sculptor

Kathy Le Vavasseur, the metamorphoses of the living

For Kathy Le Vavasseur, everything is movement. Her works—sculptures, installations, textiles—seem animated by their own breath, as if matter, traversed by the memory of gesture, continued to transform in silence. Born in Sa Đéc, on the banks of the Mekong in Vietnam, she carries within her the river's currents, the world's sediments, and the mingled memories of a triple culture: Vietnamese, French, and Italian. Now settled between Paris and Brittany, she develops work deeply rooted in transformation—alteration, mutation, rebirth—where each material, each fragment becomes the trace of a passage.

As a child, Kathy spent hours in her father's studio—an Italian sculptor and designer. At age four, she already proclaimed her desire to become an artist. The most vivid memory she keeps from that time is of dance. For lack of a school in Vietnam, she could not pursue it, but the movements of her body, the whirls of that dreamed dance, became the invisible matrix of her sculpture. Her forms, even today, seem to turn, undulate, breathe. The frustration of an impeded gesture transformed into plastic language: that of matter in perpetual becoming.

After traversing professions in which she did not recognize herself, Kathy chose to listen to what she calls her "vital impulse." This energy—visceral, instinctive, indomitable—guides her work and her existence. By resuming art studies, she finally found her path, anchored in the tangible and the emotional. Sculpture became for her an act of reconquest, a means to reclaim her history and her uprooted identity.

Her installations, between earth and air, between opacity and transparency, translate this tension between anchoring and movement. The materials she employs—stoneware, earthenware, glass, textile—respond to each other, superimpose, regenerate. She does not assemble them: she reinvents them. Transformation is her language, mutation her writing. In Translocation, the purity of forms confronts the complexity of distortions, revealing a rare mastery of matter. Circum Colonne evokes the body and its structure. The work also references the female pelvic bone, an element both organic and porous. The headdress at the top represents the inverted sacrum, culminating like a sacred temple. The body is perceived there as a sacred entity. It was created during the same period as research on neurons and the first generation of radios. This connects to the idea of the sacred body.

This work of recomposition echoes contemporary issues in architecture and ecology. Kathy inscribes herself in a conscious approach: she reuses, diverts, gives new life to materials, rehabilitates matter as we regenerate a landscape. Her sculptures become ecosystems, sensitive architectures where nature and humanity meet.

Earth occupies a central place in her work. Primordial matter, it connects body to world. Kathy deploys there the Nerikomi technique, inspired by Japanese ceramics, which allows composing strata of colored clay. Each layer becomes metaphor: that of individuality, of memory, of the coexistence of identities. Water, air, and earth unite there to generate movement, life.

Her creations never cease to question the boundary between interior and exterior, visible and invisible. In certain works, she uses X-rays—her own or those of strangers—which she associates with translucent glass threads. Glass, like the body, reveals what the eye ignores. Transparency unveils the world's flesh. These fragments of intimacy become the foundations of a new anatomy, poetic and universal.

Les Mues (The Molts) were born in 2020, but this work finds its origins more than twenty years ago, on the banks of the Ganges, around the ritual of ablutions. This is her invention, an approach that should be fully recognized as hers. On scraps of tights, she pours translucent paint, letting reptilian skins be born—thin, fragile, ready to detach. Suspended in space, they intertwine, vibrate, freeze in an instant of passage. These forms, both sensual and ephemeral, evoke the molting of body and soul, the slow acceptance of change. Life, here, is seen as a chain of metamorphoses, an abandonment to be reborn.

This symbolism of renewal traverses all her work. The flows of the Ganges and the Mekong, the cycles of purification, washing, the transformation from one state to another: everything converges there. Kathy speaks of "landscapes of passages," of "transition zones," spaces where everything recomposes itself. Her wall sculptures, suspended installations, porous volumes form hybrid territories, both organic and architectural.

Her works vibrate with a contained, almost cosmic energy. They remind us that matter is never fixed, that it remembers, adapts, renews itself. Each stratum, each texture becomes a palimpsest, a fragment of history and memory. Her work, both sensual and conceptual, evokes the necessity of transformation as a condition of life.

Kathy Le Vavasseur does not sculpt to represent, but to regenerate. Her works do not only tell the world: they transform it. Between balance and chaos, between fluidity and structure, between earth and light, she shapes forms where art meets biology, where the intimate touches the universal. In the continuous flow of her metamorphoses, matter, finally, rediscovers its vital pulsation.

Dr. Marie Bagi Director of the Musée Artistes Femmes (MAF)

March 2026

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Kathy Le Vavasseur

Kathy Le Vavasseur

Kathy Le Vavasseur