Photo by Luis Garvan
Interview with Adeline de Monseignat
Adeline de Monseignat is a sculptor who lives and works between London and Mexico City. Her work focuses on the life within inanimate entities, through the study of mythology, symbolism, anthropomorphism and the uncanny. This October, Landmarks Video presents de Monseignat's video In the Flesh, screening on a media station in the ART building located on the corner of East 23rd Street and San Jacinto Boulevard.
As a special event, On October 20th, de Monseignat will be in conversation with Andrée Bober, the founding director and curator of Landmarks. Hosted at First Light Books, the pair will discuss de Monseignat's forthcoming publication, Motherhood in Four Acts which features an essay by Bober.
We recently connected with de Monsignat to learn more about the book and her broader practice.
We are thrilled to screen In the Flesh this month as part of Landmarks Video. Can you walk us through the central themes of this work, as well as your inspiration for creating it?
In the Flesh is a five-minute black-and-white artist film that grew out of my fascination with the psychology of the uncanny and with Alison Leitch's text Visualizing the Mountain, which describes marble quarries as being "alive," "weeping at night," and having a "soul." I was drawn to the idea of reversing roles, instead of stone being likened to flesh, the performer embodies The Sculpture itself, with marble skin and human flesh. Over the course of the film, this figure becomes increasingly alive, animated by a yearning to return to its source, and ultimately crawls back into the quarry, imagined as the mother's womb, like a child returning to their mother. For me, the work was a way of questioning where life begins and ends, how materials carry presence and intimacy, and how the animate and the inanimate are more intertwined than we tend to believe.
Your upcoming publication, Motherhood in Four Acts, is centered on four works and structured in four acts. Can you describe how the book echoes a theatrical format, and how this structure offers new insights into your work?
The publication takes the form of a play in four acts, each act anchored by a sculpture or installation that corresponds to a stage of matrescence, the process of becoming a mother. Earth begins with Seedscape, travertine seeds that speak to fertility, potential, and the womb. Fire presents Uketamo, an installation in volcanic rock made for Casa Wabi Foundation, which reflects on the intensity of birth and the emptiness of the body postpartum. Air focuses on Skin to Skin, works that explore the intimacy of those first breaths and moments of contact between mother and child. Finally, Water revolves around Aurum, a fountain-like sculpture that embodies breastfeeding and the mother’s body as both vessel and provider.
By framing these works theatrically, the book underscores the vulnerability and cyclical nature of both sculpting and mothering, with moments of tension, climax, and release. It allows readers to experience my practice not as a linear chronology, but as an ongoing narrative that mirrors the rhythms of life itself. Andrée Bober's essay offers a critical perspective that interweaves with my own reflections, situating the personal within a wider cultural and material dialogue.
There seem to be parallels and recurring motifs between In the Flesh, Motherhood in Four Acts, and your larger body of work. Can you explain these connections, and how each of these artistic mediums impacts the other?
The threads connecting In the Flesh, Motherhood in Four Acts, and my wider body of work are less about linear progression and more about cycles that keep resurfacing in different forms. In the film, a marble 'sculpture' yearns to reconnect to her origin, to her mother, the quarry. That image of returning to a source, of blurring boundaries between the animate and the inanimate, already contained the seeds of questions that continue to preoccupy me: intimacy, presence, thresholds between life and matter and the irreplaceable connection between mother and child.
Those same themes reappear in Motherhood in Four Acts, but refracted through the lived experience of matrescence. The four acts unfold like stages of a body becoming and unbecoming: the seed and the womb, the fire of birth, the contact between bodies in skin-to-skin, the flow of milk. In this sense, the film, the sculptures, and the book are not separate chapters but echoes of one another, each medium allowing me to touch the same concerns differently, whether through movement, material, or language.
Together, they form a continuum in which the personal and the sculptural, the body and the material, the intimate and the universal, are always in dialogue, circling back, overlapping, and breathing through each other.
Join us on Monday, October 20th at 6:30 pm at First Light Books for an artist talk between Adeline de Monseignat and Andrée Bober. Book and reserved seats are $45/person. RSVP is free.