Sabrina Jauffret

For Sabrina Jauffret, a material rarely remains what it was at the beginning of a work. Paper swells, cracks and twists as it dries; thread can become line, seam, grid or trace; embroidered fragments can be detached and rearranged; an image made by hand can pass through a scanner and return on the surface of metal. Transformation is not simply an effect of her process but one of its central conditions. Her work repeatedly approaches the point at which deliberate construction encounters chance, resistance and change.

Born on Réunion Island and raised in France, Jauffret studied Applied Arts at the Duperré School of Applied Arts and École Boulle in Paris. Her background extends across art, interior design, product design and fashion, including work as a Creative Director. Living and working across Paris, London, Ho Chi Minh City and Shanghai brought her into contact with different craft traditions, production methods and material cultures. Rather than treating these as separate references, she allows them to overlap, combining established techniques with unexpected materials and contemporary processes.

Handmade paper became particularly important to her practice after her encounter with papermaking in Vietnam. Working with pulp, water, moulding and drying, Jauffret allows the material to retain a degree of autonomy before cutting, folding, piercing, embroidering or stitching its surface. Heat and humidity continue to act on the work as it dries; folds, cracks and distortions may redirect what happens next. Red thread enters these surfaces as both structure and trace, suggesting routes, stories and connections across changing landscapes. In her Fragmented Constellations, embroidered and printed elements mounted on magnetic supports can be removed and recomposed, shifting part of the act of composition from artist to viewer.

Her recent work pushes this movement between handcraft and technological mediation further. In Shapes of what remain, paintings created on heavily textured paper are captured gradually with a handheld scanner. The scanner does not simply reproduce the original: its movement, rhythm and occasional distortions become another act of drawing. The resulting image is transferred to aluminium, carrying the memory of a vulnerable handmade surface into a manufactured one. Natural Distortion approaches a related tension through photography, charcoal, thread and resin, setting grid-like systems against forms derived from mountainous landscapes. Across these processes, Jauffret is less concerned with preserving a medium than with what can survive its transformation: gesture, memory, irregularity and the traces left as one material state becomes another.