A sculptor, formally trained in anthropology, Lise Thiollier develops a multidisciplinary practice combining sculpture, installation, natural and social sciences, with a strong focus on environmental issues. Her work is deeply rooted in questions of time, its materiality and its capacity to transform forms, meanings, and states of matter. She weaves connections between forms, images, and language to bring forth new narratives. She engages tactile and often unstable substances, allowing chance, reaction, and gradual shifts to shape the final forms. Traces, residues, and imprints become central, revealing both the history of the material and the gestures that formed it.
At the core of her research lies an interest in invisible forces - flows of energy, and invisibilised processes that play a role in shaping the material world. These forces introduce temporalities that can exceed human perception, from the immediacy of chemical reactions to the slow transformations of living matter, to the physical infrastructures behind the digital world.
Her hybrid, moving sculptural forms celebrate the internal unfolding of the vital forces at work in the metamorphic processes of living matter. The human body, the organic, and the technological merge to give rise to a mysterious, dreamlike world with multiple temporalities.
Through her works and installations, she fuses past, present and future. Her sculptures, or imprints, carry a heavy mnemonic charge. They question the tensions between ecology, memory, and technology, proposing speculative visions of inhabiting the world.
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Born in 1992 in Paris, Lise Thiollier is a Franco-Chilean artist working mainly with sculpture and installation. She studied anthropology in the United Kingdom where she obtained a Bachelor’s degree from Sussex University and a Master’s degree in Anthropology from SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, London) in 2016. She has been a member and resident of the W Pantin studio in Pantin since 2022.
In September 2022, she undertook a residency in the Atacama Desert in Northern Chile (ISLA) to work on the subject of salt and lithium crystals, accompanied from the beginning by curator Alexia Pierre. Through the observation of salt and attentive listening to the phenomenon of crystallization, the artist’s immersion in a zone of “white gold” extraction highlighted the ethical and ecological dilemmas linked to the exploitation of natural resources in the desert. She followed the traces of salt crystals, lithium crystals, and the liquid crystals found in the LCD screens of our mobile phones.
She presented a work from this project, Salt Metamorphoses, at the Dunkirk Triennial Chaleur Humaine (Conscience énergétique), and subsequently completed a residency at L’Antre Peaux to design a habitable sculpture made of raw earth, Les Nids. In June 2024, she presented several initial directions of her research in an exhibition at the Mehun-sur-Yèvre Porcelain Center (Cher), where she drew connections between the context of Chilean lithium mines and a new lithium mining project in the Allier region, through two sound and video collaborations for the event Bourges Contemporain (Antre Peaux).
In 2024, she received the FoRTE grant from the Île-de-France region to present the full project in a first solo exhibition in January 2025, curated by Alexia Pierre at the Galerie de Noisy-le-Sec. In the autumn 2025, she completed a two-month residency at CIAP Vassivière. The research she conducted there, titled Counter-Current, examined how dependence on digital technologies and electricity shaped a relationship with the environment in this specific context. At Vassivière she played with the concept of “bug” as an embodiment of a spatio-temporal rupture and as an invisible error of the digital world. Parralelly, since last June, she has been in dialogue with scientists from the Institute of Materials of the Sorbonne Alliance (Paris I) to carry out a research-creation project as a guest artist within the laboratory in the aim of developing collaborations with scientists, on playing with approaching the invisible.