Dorothée Vantorre
Dorothée Vantorre is a French artist born in 1981 in Calais, France, where she currently lives and works. Coming from a large and creative family, Dorothée grew up in a big, dilapidated house, among cats, her father's medical newspapers, and her mother's creations. Demonstrating an early taste and talent for sculpting, she began working with polymer clay at the age of six.
Twenty years later, she briefly studied art history (deemed too theoretical for her) before graduating in architecture in 2008. She worked for an architecture studio for two years but eventually left to write a book on sculpture for beginners, published in 2012, and to start her jewelry business in 2013. As a successful businesswoman but a frustrated and aspiring artist, she began to transition toward a professional art career in 2020 and dedicated herself entirely to art from 2022.
Dorothée has been fascinated since childhood by classical art, Japanese art, Pop surrealism, African art, Art Nouveau, architecture, biological oddities, dolls, puppets, and other miniature figures. Her main sources of inspiration are nature and improbable juxtapositions. She constantly asks herself, "What if?"
Dorothée Vantorre's sculptures have been featured in various collective exhibitions, including Vivarium (2023, online collective exhibition, Pretty Girls Making Cool Shit, USA), Hashtags (2022, Arc-en-Ciel Cultural Center, Liévin, France), Dentelle Etc. (2019, Fashion and Lace Museum, Calais, France), Metamorphoses, Vol. II (2014, Arludik Gallery, Paris, France), and The Broken Internet Project (2014, virtual collective exhibition, EuroSynergy 2014, International Polymer Clay Association, Malta). Her art has been featured in a few national and international publications, among which: Polymer Journeys, Polymer Week Magazine, Version Femina, Polymer Clay Daily (US).
Artist Statement
My work focuses on hybridization. For the last decade, I have been giving life to a fantastic menagerie imbued with childlike innocence but tinged with darkness. These beings, that combine human, animal, plant, and abstract elements, are delicate, gentle, sometimes asleep, yet they can be unsettling. They are explorations of what life might evolve into, long after humans have vanished from Earth. They bear the marks of the detrimental effects left by humans on the environment: mutagens, pollutants, radiations, genetic manipulations, but they are also imbued with spirituality and magic. Some of these creatures may be of divine nature. These sculptures represent a dialogue with the future, with an underlying elegy for the vanished humanity.
I draw a lot in sketchbooks, to save my ideas for later, as inspiration comes all the time (mostly when I don’t expect it). Sculpture, and art in general, is a time-consuming process, and I know I’ll never be able to realize all my ideas in one lifetime, but when a theme keeps coming back, I know it’s worth exploring. Time helps me focus on my best ideas.
Sculpting is finding the balance between what you have in mind and the constraints of the materials. My sculptures have been primarily made of polymer clay, but, taking environmental matters at heart, I increasingly incorporate natural materials (such as felted wool and air-drying clays), reclaimed objects, and recycled materials like cardboard and paper mâché into my work. I used to work on jewelry and miniatures and, accordingly, my sculptures feature precise and delicate details, with an extra attention to colors and textures. In the future, I’d like to expand my work, pushing it to a larger scale, and perhaps even to the urban scale someday (possibly a remnant of my past as an architect).
www.dorotheevantorre.com
What is your first memory creating?
I was five or six; I was reading a book about horses and saw a drawing with the steps of the evolution of horses throughout time. I had an epiphany and decided to make tiny sculptures of the horses in modeling clay. My mother saw them, thought there was something there, and bought me my first polymer clay blocks so that I would be able to keep my artworks (she burnt the first batch of pieces in the oven but that’s another story).
What is your relationship to your medium? What draws you to it?
I’ve been using polymer clay as a medium of expression since I was a child. For me, it has always been the easiest way to convey what I’m thinking and feeling, but for years the relationship has been difficult. While it felt so natural and easy for me when I was younger, after my architecture studies, as an adult, I didn’t allow myself anymore to make what I loved and what made me happy. I thought I had to earn money first and then, after that, I would be free to make what I loved. I was forgetting the most important thing: that life is here and now.
I was so unhappy back then, but the conditioning was so deep and strong that it took me many years to understand that and fight it. The battle was useless: in the end, the only successful way to destroy my inner prison was to let go. Today, I think I am back to my childhood perfect place, to where I belong, to who I really am, to the only place where I can be truly happy.
What is the main thing you hope your audience takes away from your art?
More than anything, I’d like my art to make people dream, to inspire fantastic worlds and stories about my creatures.
Tell us about a challenge you overcame last year.
Last year was all about experimenting and going out of my comfort zone: creating more, creating bigger, creating with other materials than polymer clay: fabric, air-drying clays, papier mâché, cardboard, needle-felted wool… The other sizeable challenge was to let go of my finished works.
What is your main goal or resolution this year in terms of your art practice?
2024 is decisive because it’s the first year I will have to make a living with my art. Wish me luck! (And I have to finish all the projects I started in 2023 lol.)
