Making a work is about finding my appropriate distance to the world. Sometimes I am a painter, holding the world at a distance — reading it as image, surface, spectacle. At other times, I am a sculptor inside it, attentive to its resistances, its matter, its folds. These are not opposites but poles: two ways of negotiating the space between subject and world. Each time, I am a relief maker. Relief is not a compromise between painting and sculpture — it is a third thing, with its own logic: the logic of a surface that has been pushed, pulled, and made to carry depth.
My practice spans painting, sculpture, installation, glass, and ceramics — held together not by medium but by a sustained inquiry into world-making: how the world is fabricated, depicted, and possessed. Working across scales from intimate works on paper to large-scale architectural commissions, I move fluidly between studio and public space, between the handmade mark and the built environment.
Biography
Bouvier Ausländer treats the document — map, atlas, newspaper — as a site of contest: painted, scratched, perforated, and torn, the surfaces that modernity uses to flatten and possess the world are made to carry what they were designed to suppress: sensation, memory, the body. Yet her practice extends well beyond paper. In Manières de faire des mondes (Renens, 2016), a sculptural library commissioned for a secondary school, knowledge becomes architecture. In Ursinae (Ostermundigen, 2022), a coloured glass roof maps three constellations onto a public square. In Railway Spine (Plateforme 10, Lausanne, 2022), a kinetic installation conceived for the inauguration of one of Switzerland's foremost new cultural districts, movement and mechanical memory enter the vocabulary of surface and depth. Across these registers — relief, glass, ceramics, kinetic sculpture, Kunst und Bau — a single question persists: what does it mean to make a world, and what does it cost?
Geography, in her hands, is never purely cartographic — it is mnemonic and corporeal. The surface of the work is also a skin; the fold, a memory.
Ausländer holds a PhD from the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, and was awarded the Grand Prix of the Fondation Vaudoise pour la Culture (2017). One of her works is among the 500 featured in Destination Art — 500 Artworks Worth the Trip (Phaidon). Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions at Patrick Heide Contemporary Art (London and Brussels), Davidson Contemporary (New York), and the Musée des Beaux-Arts du Locle, among others. In 2021, her work was selected for the Royal Academy of Arts Summer Exhibition curated by Yinka Shonibare. She has participated in Women to Watch — Paper Works at Sotheby's, London, organised by the UK Friends of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington.
Her work is held in public and institutional collections including the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne; the Musée des Beaux-Arts du Locle; the Musée d'Art du Valais; the Musée Jenisch, Vevey; the Caldic Collectie / Voorlinden Museum, Wassenaar; the UCL Art Museum, London; the Frankel Collection, USA; and the Cleveland Clinic, USA.
She lives and works in Lausanne and London.