2025, JANUARY – VALÉRIE CHAUSSONNET

 

What material(s) do you use in your sculptures?
“Mostly steel, some bronze, wood, and fiber. I am also a painter, mostly in watercolor but also oil.“

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What is your primary forming method?
“Welding, forging, casting; crocheting, sewing.“

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What is your favorite surface treatment?
“I like to leave the material natural: rusty or polished in steel, and I want the welds to show. Wood: I like the tool marks to show. For fiber I use natural yarns as much as possible.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What are your favorite Tools?
“Power hammer (for forging).”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Describe your studio environment.
“I work on many projects at the same time, so it’s messy and looks chaotic (I think it looks great). My house and backyard are the studio. My whole house is my studio and gallery as well as my home. I used to make many of my steel sculpture at the fabulous ACC metal studio when I was taking classes before Covid.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How/Where do you market and sell your artwork?
“Mostly through studio tours, which I love because I get to meet people and have a conversation. I keep my website up to date with new works, and I am a little bit on Instagram. I don’t have a gallery. I don’t sell a lot, and frankly I don’t believe selling is the point (for me) when it comes to sculpture. If it were, I’d be quite distraught. Instead, I am a happy, prolific, free (but professional) artist.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What sparks your creativity? What drives you to create?
“My deep nature. I am creating (I call it “scheming”) all the time. I love making things and transforming everything I’m being offered in life into something I can offer to the public to see.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Did you come to sculpture from a different career? Tell us about your journey to becoming a sculptor.
“I started sculpture classes at the Corcoran Art School in Washington DC at night while I was working at the Smithsonian Institution as a museum anthropologist, so: researching artifacts during the day and creating some at night. I moved to Austin in 1997, pregnant, with a toddler in tow, no museum to work at, and not much money for a studio, so after a couple of years I started making mosaics on my floors, painting the walls in my home, and started oil painting as well, which I could do around babies better than welding. I signed up for welding classes again at ACC when my youngest started preschool, and resumed being a professional sculptor. In Austin I teach French out of my home to actually make a living. Still, I consider my primary profession to be artist, my second profession to be teacher.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

How have you have taken your experience as a well-established maker in the field and passed that knowledge along to other artists?
“I belong to a very large community of artists in Austin and we discuss the art scene and the life of an artist a lot. I created this community for myself over more than 20 years. I go to many art openings. I give talks when I have an exhibit myself, and I cherish conversations with visitors during studio tours.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What’s the best advice you’ve been given by a fellow maker, mentor, or teacher?
“My first sculpture teacher at the Corcoran, Somsri Schmutzardt, on the first day after the 15-person class had toured the studio (one very dusty basement room under the museum, with metal, stone, wood, resin, and clay all together), told us to “grab the material of our choice and go for it”. Coming from Europe, working in a museum, visiting art museums almost every day, and being very intimidated by a notion of art as a difficult and quasi-sacred activity, I got instantly freed from that very limiting notion. I am forever grateful. The rest of her teaching was extremely generous, along the same lines. I “grabbed” some steel, was shown how to arc weld, and fell in love instantly. That was over 35 years ago. I started creating works that I was able to exhibit publicly very quickly.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

TSOS Member Profile: Valérie Chaussonnet

Website: https://www.valeriechaussonnet.com/

Instagram: Valeriechaussonnet

Facebook: Valeriechaussonnetart

Bio:

Chaussonnet is a French-American, Austin-based sculptor and painter, currently showing a large wood, steel and fiber sculpture at the UMLAUF museum, entitled “Great Mother”. She studied sculpture at the Corcoran Art School in DC, and obtained two certificates in metal arts at ACC after moving to Austin with her young family in 1997. 

She has participated in over 100 shows in the past 10 years, including Dimension Gallery and CoLab, in Austin; the Austin Museum of Art; the Lawndale Art Center, Houston; the Grand Rapids, MI. Museum of Art; Artspace111, Fort Worth; the San Angelo Fine Arts Museum; the Umlauf Sculpture Garden + Museum & the Neill-Cochran House Museum in Austin, the Biblical Museum in Dallas, and the Contemporary Art Museum, in Plainview, TX. Her work is included in private collections nationally, in Europe and in Canada.

Chaussonnet hand-wrote and illustrated her own biography, which can be seen at https://www.valeriechaussonnet.com/Bio.

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