Eva Tellier
"I hope the sculptures provoke a sense of uncanny liveliness, an impression that they might breathe, shift, or activate themselves at any moment."
Eve Tellier is a New York–based artist whose sculptural practice blends bodily, alien, and architectural forms. In this interview, she speaks about her multicultural background, her material process, and the ideas that shape her hybrid ceramic works.
Could you tell us a bit about yourself and your background?
I was born in the French countryside in the North of France, to a French father and an Australian mother, so I grew up navigating two cultures and two languages at once. I was raised by my mother in an English-speaking household, even while living in France, and that constant shift between my home environment and the world outside often created a sense of internal duality. Because of this, I learned early on to build imaginative spaces in my mind, places where I could reconcile these overlapping identities. Growing up both in the countryside and in and around Paris made me aware of that tension between the natural world and the built environment and has deeply shaped me and my aesthetic. I’ve always been fascinated by Gothic aesthetics in particular, and that influence continues to guide much of what I’m drawn to today. At eighteen, I moved to Montréal to pursue my undergraduate studies at Concordia University in Studio Arts, specializing in Fibers and Material Practices. Being in a bilingual, bicultural city felt natural and expanded my way of thinking. It was there that I discovered ceramics, which eventually led me to the United States. I later moved to upstate New York to complete my master’s degree in ceramics at Alfred University. My artistic practice has been shaped by these moves and the search for environments that allow me to work and grow. Constant displacement has also pushed me to create grounding, imaginative spaces, alternatives to any single place I could call home. I am now based in New York City.
Your sculptures fuse bodily and alien forms, often appearing part creature, part artifact. What interests you about creating forms that sit between the human and the non-human?
I’m drawn to creating forms that sit between the human and the non-human because I’m interested in collapsing the boundaries we so often rely on to define ourselves. I’m constantly thinking about the tension between what is human-made and what is naturally occurring, and how we construct paradigms and binaries such as living/non-living, psyche/matter, subject/object, in order to perform humanness. The artifacts, technologies, and objects we create become extensions of our collective psyche, revealing how we position ourselves in relation to the organic world. We distance ourselves from that world, sometimes out of fear, discomfort, or a phobic response to the natural. This repression is central to how I think about re-integrating the organic into human experience. My sculptures merge human and non-human qualities as a way to regroup and re-merge these categories, dissolving the separations we rely on but that also limit us. From a maker’s perspective, everything we modify in our environment reflects how we extend our bodies and our sense of self. I think of my process with ceramics as a form of technology, ceramic truly represents one of our earliest material modifications for functional, human purposes. I often return to that first usage of ceramic as I make my sculptures. This technological lineage allows me to explore the body and the ways we extend ourselves by altering our environment and the artifact aspect of the work is just as important as the bodily one. My practice moves constantly between interpretation and the tangible reality of what sits before us. I think a lot about our “human” interaction with the environment about what is built versus what is grown, what is and what could be, and the limits between the emotional experience of being alive and the structured, material world.
Ant/i/bodies, 2025, photo credit: Zander Jonsson
Ant/i/bodies, 2025, photo credit: Zander Jonsson
Coma, 2025, photo credit: Zander Jonsson
There’s a sense of both strength and vulnerability in your materials and surfaces, from their muscular structures to their fragile, skin-like textures. How do you approach this balance when making your work?
I’m really inspired by how structures in nature hold both fragility and strength at the same time. I’m always thinking about transformation, metamorphosis, birth and decay and how those opposing forces exist simultaneously in the material world. These dynamics shape both my concepts and how I physically make the work. The balance of strength and vulnerability in the pieces emerges from a constant back-and-forth between control and intuition. Much of my process begins with an emotional or intuitive impulse, driven by a desire to create forms that provoke a bodily empathy in the viewer. Over the past year, I’ve been building primarily through a tubular coiling system, of constructing with hollow, anatomical tubes and then carving into them. These tubes suggest muscular or skeletal structures, yet they are always exposed, punctured with open pores that introduce a sense of fragility and porosity. Despite this vulnerability, the forms often hold themselves with a proud, even defensive posture. This tension extends to the surfaces: I use them to navigate attraction and repulsion, inviting the viewer closer through seductive textures while simultaneously unsettling them. Many elements on the forms function as both ornament and armament, decorative yet protective, reflecting how acts of adornment can also serve as acts of defense. I translate these reflections through particular choices of material; clay offers strength and permanence, while silicone, wax, and bioplastics introduce softness, intimacy, or ephemerality. The anatomy-like forms are carefully constructed, but the exoskeletal details emerge intuitively, almost as if generated by the material itself.
The pieces carry a strange liveliness, as if they might breathe or shift at any moment. What kind of reaction or feeling do you hope these sculptures provoke in the viewer?
I hope the sculptures provoke a sense of uncanny liveliness, an impression that they might breathe, shift, or activate themselves at any moment. I’m deeply interested in illusion, fiction, and mythology, so creating forms that sit on the edge of animation is central to the intrigue I want viewers to feel. I aim for a response that is both attracted and unsettled, especially because parts of the work resist familiar notions of visual pleasure or humanness. Elements of the abject, such as detached hair, help cultivate that ambivalence, pushing the viewer into a space where fascination and discomfort coexist. Material and textural variation also plays a key role. Combining ceramic with softer or stranger surfaces introduces a sentient quality that interrupts the inertness we typically associate with sculpture. My strategy is to pull viewers in through multiplicity and a maximalist aesthetic: dense surfaces, layered textures, and intricate anatomical suggestions. Ideally, once drawn closer, they linger long enough to consider what these bodily elements might signify within the utopian or speculative worlds I imagine for them.
French Knitter, 2025, photo credit: Zander Jonsson
Twisted Wings, 2025, photo credit: Zander Jonsson
Hornette (taille de guepe), 2025, photo credit: Zander Jonsson
Tell us a bit about how you spend your day / studio routine? What is your studio like?
I’m very much a morning person, so my studio day usually starts early. I wake up and head straight to the Museum of Arts and Design, where I’m currently in residence on the sixth floor. Having a studio in Manhattan has been incredible, I open the space to the public three days a week, and the remaining days offer quiet privacy to focus on my work. I typically begin with administrative tasks: answering emails, checking deadlines, handling applications and then move into the physical work of the studio. Most days involve extruding tubes; the core building system for my ceramic sculptures. I usually have several pieces in different stages: some drying, others at the leather-hard stage ready for carving, and others waiting for coils or finishing touches in silicone, wax, or bioplastic. My routine stretches across many activities that sustain the practice: forming shapes, repetitive motions, intuitive carving, sketching ideas, recording thoughts, and reading influences ranging from Gothic writing to queer ecology and post-humanist theory. My studio itself has drawings pinned to the walls, shelves full of materials, large works on the floor, and a wall-mounted extruder. By the window overlooking Central Park, there’s a bean bag where I nap and think about future ideas
What artwork have you seen recently that has resonated with you?
A recent artwork that resonated deeply with me came from the Burke Prize finalists’ talks at the Museum of Arts and Design this november. Hearing the artists speak about their practices was incredibly inspiring and I was especially moved by the work of this year’s prize winner, Hai Wen Lin. Their approach rooted in care, deconstruction, and a kind of building-by-unbuilding, felt connected to my own interests. They create kites that borrow the language of clothing, using structure and fabric to imagine ways bodies might move, extend, and take flight. What struck me most was how these kites become metaphors for freeing or expanding the self, suggesting the various possibilities of existing in space. The work’s blend of material sensitivity, poetic imagination, and deviation from traditional functionality resonated strongly with my own dedication to form and process. There is a utopian and mythic quality in how they portrays movement, and embodiment, one that connects with my interest for hybrid forms and my reflections on what it means to inhabit a body or allow it to extend beyond the limits imposed on it.
Is there anything new and exciting in the pipeline you would like to tell us about?
I’m currently still an artist fellow at the Museum of Arts and Design, where I’ll be working in the artist studios until the end of February 2026. Having several more months in that space is very exciting, especially as the residency will culminate in an artist talk on January 9th. The talk will be followed by an open-studio evening where I’ll transform my space into a small exhibition, giving visitors a chance to see the works I’ve been developing throughout my time there. Another great prospect is that my best friend and artist, Joël Brodovsky-Adams and I are setting up a new studio in Sunset Park, Brooklyn. This marks an important transition, as I’m fully anchoring myself in New York City and building a long-term working environment here. All of this combined makes the coming months feel full of growth and new creative energy.
All images courtesy of the artist
Interview publish date: 20/11/2025
Interview by Richard Starbuck
