Eva Tellier
- Anna Lilli Garai
- Nov 11, 2025
- 8 min read
Eva Tellier is a French artist living in New York City. She works with ceramics, fibers, and organic materials. Her sculptures draw inspiration from the structures of living things and how they can be reshaped by hand. Made from hollow clay tubes and soft, skin-like materials, her pieces have a sense of movement and vulnerability. Her works develop slowly through carving and joining, revealing openings and folds that seem almost bodily. In pieces like "French Knitter (A Tube Within A Tube)", Tellier transforms familiar materials into hybrid forms. Her pieces feel both intimate and strange, part organism and part machine.
Q: What first drew you to the mix of human, animal, and organic forms?
A: I've always been drawn to fluid movement and the accumulation of living forms within an environment, whether in my drawings or any other medium I work in. Over time, it felt like a natural progression to anthropomorphize plants, to make the human form more plant-like, the animal more human, and to blur or collapse those categories altogether. I often use structures, motifs, and patterns found in nature to do this. That kind of visual language has always been part of human expression — through ornamentation, decoration, furniture, architecture. It's both a historical and aesthetic reference point for me.
Much of my aesthetic research starts with visual texture or form — specifically those that provoke ambivalence. I'm interested in images or shapes that evoke both attraction and repulsion, that are at once mesmerizing and a little terrifying. The sublime is a big part of that: things that are “awful” in the older sense; full of awe. Nature is full of these contradictions, and I’m drawn to it because it holds that duality. It's how evolution works — defense mechanisms, mating displays — it’s biology, but it’s also deeply psychological and emotional. My work often sits at the intersection of visual provocation and speculative biology.
Using human, animal, and organic forms also opens up a space for folklore, mythology, and storytelling. These bodies are familiar, they carry symbolic weight and so they become accessible ways to explore ideas of transformation and narrative. They help me construct a personal mythology that's rooted in recognizable, yet often hybrid, forms. That relatability becomes a tool for connection, but also for unsettling and reimagining what these forms can mean.
Q: You work with fragility and strength side by side. How do you find that point of balance?
A: Like I mentioned earlier, I'm really inspired by the complexity and multiplicity in natural forms, how structures in nature hold both fragility and strength at the same time. That duality has shaped both my concepts and how I physically make the work.
I’m always thinking about transformation, metamorphosis, birth and decay and how those opposing forces exist simultaneously in the material world. I build my sculptures by subtracting material, carving away to reveal forms, which creates a lot of negative space and structural precarity. There's a tension in pushing the material to its limit, making something that looks like it might collapse or barely stands, like it’s defying gravity. That physical vulnerability becomes part of the illusion I’m trying to create.
There’s also this maximalist aesthetic I work with that feels delicate, but is almost overwhelming, there’s a kind of intensity in the excess. That excess can feel both intimate and raw, which mirrors how I think about bodies and how we present ourselves in the world. I’m often looking at how living beings, especially humans, decorate or modify themselves, how we make ourselves vulnerable to be seen, but also fierce in how we protect or defend our identities.
Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about world-building and unbuilding, and how those ideas show up both in my process and in the conceptual framework of the work. I'm interested in collapsing binaries; hard and soft, pain and pleasure, psyche and body, strength and fragility.
When those opposites come together, something strange and tender can emerge.
A lot of this also ties back to how we have defined “femininity.” It’s often constructed as something delicate, small, pretty, almost fragile. At the same time, “femininity” can be excessive, unruly, fierce, and threatening. Lauren Elkin in her book Art Monsters says: “Being female often means being caught between beauty and excess.” That contradiction really informs aesthetic research in my work I’ve been calling Decorative Monstrosity.
Q: “French Knitter (A Tube Within A Tube)” hints at both touch and labor. How personal is that connection for you?
A: “French Knitter (A Tube Within A Tube)” is a personal piece, inspired by a childhood toy I used to play with — a knitting tool also known as a French knitter. You feed yarn through a tube and loop it to create a continuous, crocheted strand. That repetitive, almost meditative process really stuck with me. It’s tied to early experiences of making, using my hands, and spending time crafting not just objects but ideas, thinking through touch, through doing.
The piece itself is a large, hybrid figure part nematode parasite (also called a tube within a tube) and part oversized knitting tool. It’s a “body” that extrudes synthetic hair from metal tongs at its top, which then flows down and exits through the feet in these tentacular forms. As the hair comes out, it’s adorned with small black bows. It is knitting itself, building its own nervous or digestive system from extension hair, which for me represents femininity as something constructed, processed, and often artificial. The use of synthetic hair is important as it speaks to artifice and the ways we replicate and perform identity, especially feminine or femme identity. I wanted the figure to feel both technological and organic, like something emerging from the soil, collapsing the boundary between body, machine, and nature. I was also thinking a lot about the body as a system, an entrance, an exit, a kind of walking tube. The title plays with that too. The bows at the end of the “tail” of hair are like a final adornment, a symbol of the human ways we organize or stylize the organic, how we decorate, tidy, embellish. There’s labor in this piece, repetitive, intimate, bodily labor. And in that labor, there’s also thought, memory, and self-construction. The connection to touch and labor is very personal, it’s about making, digesting, and transforming all at once.
Q: The tube shows up a lot in your sculptures. What keeps you coming back to that shape?
A: I started working with the tube through an ongoing investigation into finding my own technique within ceramics. I’ve always thought of ceramics not just as a material, but as an ancient technology, one of the earliest ways humans extended their bodies into the world. Instead of using full coils, I began working with hollow coils — extruded tubes — which let me build structures that are both light and strong.
This approach allowed me to develop what I now call a tubular matrix, a system of making where the surface and structure are fully integrated. I carve into the tubes with precision, almost like a surgical dissection, to create texture, openings, and reliefs.
The ornamentation becomes inseparable from the form; it’s both skin and bone, both decorative and structural. That process lets me build bodies that feel both skeletal and fleshy, solid and porous. The tube itself is such a compelling shape because it’s everywhere — in the body, in nature, in architecture. It’s a conduit, a channel, something that connects inside and outside. It shows up in digestive tracts, fallopian tubes, veins, roots, stems, plumbing, scaffolding. It’s simultaneously functional and metaphorical.
Each sculpture evolves from the last, but they all come from this same “genetic code” of the tube. That repetition and variation mimic biological processes — like growth, mutation, or adaptation. There’s something insect-like about it too. At one point I realized I wasn’t the first to build with clay tubes; some species of wasps actually do the same to create their shelters. I loved that realization, it made me feel like part of a much older lineage of builders.
So the tube keeps coming back because it ties everything together: process, body, biology, architecture, even mythology. It’s become an endless source of inspiration and a tool that continues to feed both my technical exploration and conceptual thinking.
Q: Your work often feels like it’s breathing or mutating. Does that sense of motion come from instinct or planning?
A: When I’m making the work, there’s a constant back-and-forth between planning and intuition. For the more technically ambitious pieces, I definitely have to plan ahead. But once I get to the carving stage, the process becomes much more intuitive. That’s when I start responding to the piece as it evolves by following the forms I initially set up, but letting them shift and mutate as I work.
Carving is when the piece really comes alive for me. It feels like it starts to make itself in a way, I’m just following its logic, letting it guide me. That part of the process allows for spontaneity, surprise, and even a kind of dialogue with the material. I never fully know how it will turn out, and that’s what keeps it exciting. I’m also really interested in the tension between our human impulse for order and our rejection of the organic, how we try to impose symmetry, pattern, and control onto things that are naturally chaotic or wild. In my work, I’m always juggling that tension: using codes of ornament and symmetry, but fusing them with the unpredictability of natural growth. That fusion is where the energy of the piece lives for me.
Nature is a constant source of inspiration because, on a micro level, it’s incredibly precise and geometric but when you zoom out, it’s messy, excessive, and overwhelming. That sense of bewilderment, the clash between control and chaos is something I think a lot about, especially in relation to how we navigate our own complex and messy humanness in a world contrived by rigid binaries and structures.
Q: How has your idea of the body changed since you started making these hybrid forms?
A: My idea of the body hasn’t necessarily changed, but it’s deepened. I’ve always questioned the body and been curious about how we define it, extend it, and present it in the world. Through making these hybrid forms, I’ve become even more aware of how bodies interact with space — how we use objects like furniture, adornments, jewelry, acrylic nails, piercings, femme accessories; all these extensions of the body that help us express, perform, or protect our sense of self.
What has evolved is how I think about creating emotional responses to bodies like empathy, sympathy, and even antipathy. I want the anatomies in my work to feel relatable, but not always comfortable. That’s why I often anthropomorphize the sculptures or reference familiar materials, because even if they’re strange or hybridized, there's always something recognizable. Flesh is something we all live in, it is the universal experience.
We all know what it feels like to be in a body — its pleasures, its discomforts, its limits.
A big part of my intention is to translate that physical and emotional experience; the awkwardness and the intimacy of embodiment into form. Especially now, when so much of our existence is mediated through screens, or spent more isolated, I think we’re experiencing less actual contact. Maybe that’s part of why I’m drawn to this work, because it insists on tactility, on presence, on physical response. I’m also really interested in the possibilities of what bodies can become, both socially and politically. My work tries to live in that in-between space where bodies and objects are morphing, mutating, or becoming what they need to be.
There’s a chapter in Sara Ahmed’s Living a Feminist Life called Feminism is Sensational, and it resonates deeply with me. It’s not about representing the body in a literal way, but about capturing the sensations we experience through the body — the affects, the psychological shifts, and the ways those experiences become political.
