Sculpted Light

Sculpted Light marks Émilie Lemardeley's first museum exhibition and a significant milestone in the artist's career.

Presented within the eighteenth-century Musée Mandet, the exhibition brings together a major selection of sculptures in blown glass and bronze that explore light not as an optical phenomenon, but as a living material capable of shaping space and perception. Conceived in close dialogue with the museum's architecture, each work responds to the building's volumes, natural illumination, and mineral surfaces, transforming the historic interiors into a landscape of reflections, shadows, and luminous presences.

Featuring works from the Dryades, Posidoni, Germs, and Mouvances series, the exhibition develops a reflection on perception itself. Light is never treated as something that simply reveals objects; it becomes an active force through which forms continually appear, disappear, and transform. The sculptures invite visitors to experience seeing as a dynamic process rather than a fixed act.

Drawing on phenomenological thought, the exhibition proposes that perception is not detached observation but a relationship continuously negotiated between body, space, and light. Sculpture becomes less an object to contemplate than an environment to inhabit.

The exhibition Sculpted Light was curated by Ygaël Attali, co-founder of Galerie Philia.