Adeline de Monseignat (b. 1987) is a Dutch-Monegasque artist living and working between Mexico City and London. Her sculptural practice explores themes of transformation, fertility, and the cyclical nature of life, often drawing inspiration from the natural world, motherhood, and mythology. Working primarily with materials such as stone, bronze, and glass, she creates tactile, sensuous forms that blur the line between the animate and inanimate, the bodily and the architectural.
Your sculptures often feature recurring motifs like spheres, seeds, and ladders, evoking the cyclical nature of life. What draws you to these forms?
I’m drawn to forms that embody continuity, shapes that suggest protection, growth, or transition. The sphere, the seed, the ladder: they each carry their own quiet symbolism of potential and transformation. They feel like vessels for time, reminders that nothing is ever static, that we’re always in motion, always becoming.
You often juxtapose materials such as natural stone and polished bronze. Have you always been interested in these material dialogues?
Yes, very much so. For me, materials are protagonists, they carry emotional and historical weight. Stone holds memory, while bronze embodies transformation. I love the tension between the raw and the refined, the natural and the manmade. When placed together, they converse about permanence, fragility, and what it means to endure.
Adeline de Monseignat, The Glue, 2023, White Travertine, Polished Bronze and Plywood Support. You’ve described your exhibitions as contemplative spaces. How do you invite viewers into this sense of slowing down or meditation through sculpture and installation?
I think it’s about presence. I try to create environments that whisper rather than shout, where forms breathe, where negative space becomes as meaningful as the object itself. The viewer is invited to slow down, to listen with their eyes, to let the works reveal themselves gradually. It’s a kind of quiet encounter, one that mirrors the pace of making itself.
You’ve spoken about matrescence—the process of becoming a mother. How has this experience influenced your creative practice or the way you think about care in your sculptures?
Motherhood has deepened my understanding of care, both as an act and as an energy that circulates between bodies, materials, and spaces. My work has become more attuned to the ideas of protection, repair, and tenderness, but also to the messier realities of transformation, the bruises, the fatigue, the fierce love. It’s made me more porous, more empathetic towards the materials I work with and what they endure.
Lot 5. Adeline de Monseignat - Little Treasures 1
How did the brief for this auction – “This Is Dedicated to the One I Love” – inspire your piece?
Little Treasures emerged from the tenderness of small gestures. They are two collages made of hand-cut paper in the shape of pebbles, humble, pocket-sized tokens of affection. I thought about how love often resides in the smallest of things: a pebble found, a keepsake held, a moment remembered. These works are my quiet dedications, to intimacy, to memory, to the poetry of the everyday.
Do you have any projects on the horizon that you would like to share?
Yes, this week I’m opening my solo ‘The Great Escape’ at Cadogan Gallery (Opening: Thursday 6 November 6-8pm, open: 7 November-6 December 2025) where, following the recent introspective works on matrescence, I now turn my gaze outwards towards my children as I observe the way they grow and explore the world around them, with insatiable curiosity.
My other solo show ‘Playscape’ at Bo Lee and Workman in Somerset opened in September and will be open until 15 November. The whole gallery has been transformed into an interactive playground where the sculptures, like creatures, peak through the ground and rise above it, ready to interact with the public.
Visit Adeline's website.
Questions by Victoria Lucas.
Banner Image: Luis Garvan
