Mathilde Albouy (born 1997, France) is a Paris-based sculptor and installation artist whose practice navigates the paradoxical terrain between care and coercion, play and ritual, vulnerability and control.
She transforms distilled domestic objects—like oversized combs and hairpins—into creatures that oscillate between seductive guardians and menacing forms, tapping into feminist science-fiction narratives to subvert binary realities. Her work often employs materials such as wood, lead, tin, beeswax, and steel, rendered with an uncanny strangeness and ritual intensity that invite reflection on gendered power dynamics.
Playing on both formal and conceptual paradoxes, Mathilde Albouy’s sculptural work invites the viewer to a game whose rules are not clearly defined. We don’t know whether the encounter with her sculptures is an act of courtship or predation, confronting us with a dangerous seduction. Nourished by feminist science fiction, Mathilde uses the fictions generated by her pieces as political tools to question an established, binary reality. By hijacking scales and materials, the sometimes sharp or toxic objects become individuals in their own right, revealing how the beauty of objects, particularly feminine ones, conveys patterns of oppression.