Biography

FR / EN

 

I do not create when I sculpt. I create the spaces in between.

First as a journalist, then as a psychotherapist, I spent thirty years listening beyond words, attending to silences, sensing what people were going through. 
In the background, I was always sculpting, painting, writing.

In 2020, I made a choice. Out of necessity : to be an artist, fully, entirely, exclusively. 

My sculptures carry stories I have heard along with their memories — as well as my own. At first they were raw and unfiltered. They now seek a different equilibrium, one that is more intimate and alive in order to reach toward the invisible. 

I live inside matter. I pour my feelings into bronze. My body knows. I let my hands lead. I work instinctively. I reveal my fragility and imperfections. I say something about the unspeakable. That shared vulnerability at the core of being human.

I shape what refuses to be silenced.

Everything is matter — sensitive and conscious.

 

 

 

 

Amélie Rufenacht is a French artist born in 1966 in Le Havre. She lives and works between Paris and the island of Porquerolles. After many years as a journalist, she became a psychotherapist and art therapist. She has been fully dedicated to her artistic practice since 2020.

Working across sculpture, painting and writing, her practice is rooted in the realm of sensation and explores the vulnerability of life through a constant dialogue between balance and tension. She works with texture until a sense of presence emerges, questioning the subtle relationship between the visible and the invisible.

 

She grounds the mineral, assembles the vegetal and gives new life to fragments of dead wood. Her universe moves from the intimate to the universal — everything is interconnected. Through creation, she transforms herself. She opens inhabitable spaces inviting others to engage with matter.

 

Her work has been shown in exhibitions — including site-specific installations, interactive sculptures and monumental commissions — at the Orangerie du Sénat (Paris, 2024) and at the Maison du Commandant (Porquerolles, 2025), as well as in several Parisian galleries. She also installs outdoor sculptures paired with podcasts where the sculpture speaks in the first person.

 

 

 

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