(French-Dutch, b.1998, London)

To value a texture

Akin to diaphanous relics {1}

‘When the ear tells the eye where to look’ {2} 

A joy-noir atopic eroded our city of skins. {3}

We coaxed up a land with our bones and our blues

for a wild Mélusine to appear in the factory loos {4}

Mistaking her products for sins

I confess, in the mess, your trash is my kin.

Traces you leave me, my piece I sieve through 

Look not on her sins but on the grace of your earth

In this murky keep, our freedom sings

Why protect us from all contrariety? 

We could make in joyful scope

For the loving of a stateless 

Dreamer geist. 

My name is Apolline. I am an audio-inflected Surrealist and bricoleuse exploring the act of listening to materials and their memories. As a highly sensitive person, I foster a sense of belonging to the world through a deeply sensual engagement with its sights, sounds, and textures.

My work often approaches representations of reality without ever fully arriving. It is filled with aqueous textures, fibres, hi-vis tape, religious symbols, road signs, translucent glazes, and sheer fabrics. Ghostly elements—webs, flesh, goat eyes, animal shadows, and debris—frequently emerge in my pieces, creating a surreal atmosphere which evokes my experience of navigating spaces in London. I take inspiration from peeling paint, torn posters, graffiti, chemical decay, and dust lines, all in an attempt to capture the essence of this relationship.

In this way, my work functions as an ongoing archive—a haptic dialogue with the myriad tones and textures revealed through close attention to detail. I begin with waste material from previous projects or found objects, creating drawings, paintings, collages, cut-outs, mixed media assemblages, and jewellery. Each piece is an attempt to marry my vision of these materials with their past lives, their present and their future.

Ultimately, this makes my practice a collaborative one, mediated by this process of exchange. I explore the point at which a material is erased to reveal its socio-political conditions. In my hands, a material is both a human resource and an object of social exchange. What becomes valuable is the insight others bring to these works—the details they in turn choose to point out. At the same time, I seek to honour and delight in its non-human existence—its materiality, its randomness.

My creative journey has been profoundly influenced by the ongoing Surrealist movement, particularly the works of Léonor Fini and Dorothea Tanning. Their expansive, subversive visions inspired me during my studies on the poetics and politics of Surrealism at Cambridge, where I sharpened one of my main tools: "détournement." This practice of reusing symbols and their learned associations empowers the abstract into something rich and strange. Richer in its capacity for multiple meanings, strange in its potential to reshape how we see the world—and how I do.

This page represents some of those threads, born from my art foundation at the Ateliers de Sèvres, my History of Art degree and my late studio—an old Rolls Royce warehouse turned fish factory, wedged between an annexe and a makeshift gym. It was during this time that I became acutely aware of the many layered localities coexisting within London’s ever-changing landscape, and it is this philosophy of layering that I have engaged with ever since.