Marie-Laure Teisseire
Contemporary wood, stone and metal sculptor
Contemporary sculptures exploring memory and traces
Traces, signs, languages: sculptural and memorial writing
Materials: wood, metal, stone, paper
Sculptures and immersive installations: creating, communicating, sharing
My work as a contemporary sculptor explores what settles, persists, or fades away: the marks of time, the imprints left by living beings, the writings of memory. I question these traces, whether tiny or powerful, like fragments of memory inscribed in matter. Through my sculptures combining wood, metal, stone, or paper, I explore how forms preserve gestures, retain stories, and convey a sensitive narrative.
Sculpture and calligraphy meet at the heart of my artistic approach. They intertwine to question the circulation of memory, its journey between gesture and matter, between what is written and what is embodied. I explore how a sign, a letter, a line can become language, sculpture, message, or visual heritage.
Wood, the central material in my work, carries its own stories: undulating grain, rings that tell of time, galleries of bark beetles resembling unintentional alphabets. Calligraphic paper, meanwhile, preserves the precise trace of the gesture, the letters and words that extend human memory. In my contemporary art installations, whether participatory, sound-based, or light-based, I also invite the public to leave their mark: a word left on a tree, a collective story reinvented, an ancient alphabet evoked at the foot of a century-old cherry tree.
This circulation of signs—from the living to the human, from the human to the work, and sometimes from the work to the community—is now the main focus of my research. It guides each of my creations, whether it is a sculpture in solid wood or stone, an immersive installation, or a work combining language, light, and matter.
In my practice as a contemporary sculptor, I explore two complementary creative processes, two ways of approaching the dialogue between matter, signs, and language. I like to blur the boundaries between disciplines—sculpture, calligraphy, typography, drawing, photography—to open up a space where gesture, matter, and memory intertwine.
The first process arises from a direct and sensitive relationship with wood. I allow myself to be guided by what the material already carries within it: its stains, its rings, its fractures, the tunnels left by insects. Wood then becomes a creative partner. I read its surface like an ancient text, immersing myself in its rhythms, then responding to it with my gestures. From this encounter emerge works in which organic forms unfold freely. The goal is to reveal the material, to highlight its profound identity and to inscribe my artistic expression on it without constraining it.
The second process, on the contrary, starts with a design imagined beforehand. The wood then serves the form I wish to convey. I work on sculptures with sober, pure, elegant lines. The fantasy is not in chance but in interpretation: of a typographic character, an archetypal figure, a graphic element.
As in a palimpsest, each gesture can cover, reveal, or transform the previous one, creating visual layers where the past dialogues with the present. I bring forth hybrid forms, where one can guess a letter, a fragment of a word, an echo of language, carrying both a story and a part of mystery.
My contemporary sculptures come to life through the dialogue between material and memory. Solid wood—ash, walnut, oak, cherry, pear, or chestnut—becomes both a medium and a partner: its grain, rings, stains, galleries, and cracks tell the story of time and nourish the gesture. Stone—marble or serpentine—and metal—raw steel or brushed stainless steel—bring their own qualities and enrich this sculptural language. Paper, whether calligraphic or worked as a material, preserves and transmits the traces of human gestures and words.
Each creation is born from an intimate encounter with the material. Drawing, coming into contact with the saw, gouge, chisel, or burin, polishing—from the rasp to the finest sandpaper—and the final assembly all contribute to revealing the memory inscribed in the material and giving it form.
My works thus become layers where the past and the present intersect, where each imprint, each line, and each hollow carries a sensitive narrative. Wood, metal, stone, and paper are not just materials: they are vectors of memory, supports of language, and witnesses of time, in which I seek to inscribe my artistic expression, between poetic freedom and formal rigor.
My approach combines contemporary sculpture, calligraphy, drawing, photography, interactive installations, and sound or light devices. I like to compose spaces where matter dialogues with language, where a sculpted volume responds to a calligraphic word, where light extends one form and reveals another.
At the heart of my work, I create places where individual and collective memory can be woven together. The public is invited to write, leave a word, leave a trace—a simple gesture that becomes part of the work. In these participatory installations, contributions respond to each other like the layers of a moving narrative: a tale composed of words left on a tree, an ancient alphabet evoked by light, a fragment of history inscribed in the material or space.
Mediation is then no longer an addition, but the substance of the creation itself: a living process where the work is completed through contact with others, where transmission becomes an artistic act, and where everyone can experience an intimate connection with matter, language, and time.
My name is Marie-Laure Teisseire, I am a visual artist and sculptor, born in 1970 in Reims and now living in Isère.
After studying pharmacy and ecotoxicology, I spent many years working on the relationship between human activity and living organisms. This perspective on the fragility of the world has always fueled my artistic sensibility.
In 2001, my encounter with the sculptor Jean Barral Baron marked a turning point: I discovered the work of the material, the slow rhythm of carving, the depth of the gesture. Contemporary calligraphy, learned from Marine Porte de Sainte Marie, as well as drawing and photography, gradually completed my artistic language.
In 2024, a profound career change led me to devote my life to creation.