Delphine Pouillé is an artist living and working between Paris and Vienna. Building fabric forms which she injects with expanding foam, Pouillé creates otherworldly objects and appendages. Standing in her all white Paris studio, shoes removed, it recalls sci-fi scenes of hidden labs storing alien bodies in cryogenic hibernation.
Controlling the foam as it inflates, spurred the evolution of her work from perfectly smooth contours contained within a fuzzy skin, to allowing for the spontaneity of the material which often ruptures through the seams. With no desire to limit her practice to one medium, her works have included performance, video, animation, drawing and sculpture. Her videos are “catalogues” of uses and unique movements performed by people while bound up in her playful, wearable sculptures.
The defining characteristic of Pouillé’s practice is her laboratory’esq method of experimentation, observation and repair. Damaged Thrums are often fixed with “bandages” - squares of poly fabric pinned over unyielding excretions of foam. She extends limbs and fill holes to maintain, fracture or ‘improve’ them. Post-human bodies for considering mutations, which are in fact the natural outcome of the un-natural material from which they’re made.
Ashlee Conery, Post-Corpse: The Work of Delphine Pouillé, 2014
