Text by Andrée Bober, Curator and Founding Director of Landmarks, the public art program of The University of Texas at Austin

Origins—the etymology of words, the seed that blossoms, the woman who births—have long preoccupied Mexico City-based artist Adeline de Monseignat. Her recent works chronicle the associated pleasures and challenges of her transition into motherhood. Through a serene palette of natural materials and sensuous forms that echo the human body, she explores fertility, nature, pain, and resilience through sculptures, drawings, prints, and collages. Although her sculptures initially convey a sense of precision and control, upon closer examination they reveal irregularities. Polished surfaces, harmonious proportions, and meticulously crafted details meet the inherent flaws in organic materials, the subtle traces of the human hand, and pieces that resist nestling together seamlessly. Embracing these elements of chance as part of her artistic practice, Monseignat accepts the unpredictability of nature in ways that make her work vibrant and accessible. She approaches motherhood with a similar openness and vitality, drawing inspiration from the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi, a philosophy that celebrates impermanence and authenticity as intrinsic elements of beauty.

Extracted from publication Adeline de Monseignat: Motherhood in Four Acts, Published by Anomie, 2025

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Text by Paul Carey-Kent, Art Critic, Curator and Writer

London and Mexico City-based artist Adeline de Monseignat has long had a fascination for ladders. Her interest was triggered by spending time in marble quarries, where ladders are scattered all over the vast open spaces, and shehas frequently worked sculpturally with marble.However, A Escala Inhumana translates that grand spatial experience into a demonstration of how ladders can be used to distort our sense of scale in microcosmic worlds, too. In this short film shot in Oaxaca, the native leaf-cutter ants are seen carrying ladders. In highlighting the diligence of worker ants, the film implicitly projects their strength and resilience onto the indefatigably industrious people of Mexico. The ladder is, after all, a quintessential worker's tool. These perfectly shaped ladders – cut one by one from mango tree leaves – also act as a reminder of the human impact on nature: making our world ever more industrial, ever less ‘natural’, turning mountains into cubes… and leaves into ladders.

Extracted from publication The Book of Ladders: 100 Contemporary Artworks, 2022

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Text by Henry Martin, Art Writer, Academic and Editor

A ladder seems a particularly mundane object, but de Monseignat intuitively understands (and, in turn, asks us to understand) that objects have resonances beyond their physical form or designated use. Like words, their meanings adapt according to context and intent. Échelle Charnelle reminds me that a ladder is no ordinary thing, despite its ubiquity. One only has to remember being a child to recall the excitement that came with placing a foot on its rung. To see the world from a slightly different perspective (before an adult swiftly removed you) felt like a transgressive and liberating act. To come across a ladder leaning against a wall signified not only the possibility for escape (and the wider world beyond) but also an unsolved mystery: how did this ladder get here, who was using it, what were they doing?

Extracted from exhibition catalogue Adeline de Monseignat: O, Ronchini Gallery, 2018

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Text by Jo Applin, Professor of History of Art, Curator and Writer

Fetching and carrying her belongings to and from her childhood home, de Monseignat reworks the physical materials and psychological memories of home into new configurations. Through a process of artistic translation, the bedding and awnings are made to stand for something once known and familiar, now remade anew. Home, we might say, is the materialisation of de Monseignat’s baggage. It is an interior landscape of half-remembered and abstracted fabrics and smells, of touch and sight. […] we cautiously enter Home, uncertain of what might happen, but certain that something will happen, or has already. The secret of the work—like the half-buried glass orbs—is passed from the artist to us, trapped for a time in her childhood memory of a home that, for a moment, becomes ours too.

Extracted from exhibition catalogue Adeline de Monseignat: Home, Published by Ronchini Gallery, 2014

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Text by James Putnam, Independant Curator and Writer

By combining familiar elements in unfamiliar and contradictory scenarios and environments, de Monseignat [is] able to unlock our access to the weird and unnatural through the notion of The Uncanny - the familiar-yet-strange. [Her] works are liminal, hovering on the border between our conscious and unconscious minds, unsettling yet not directly threatening because [she] incorporate[s] characteristics that can be found in the familiar and seemingly harmless. While [her] works are not intended to have any concrete meaning they possess a mesmerizing quality rooted in psychological states and when confronting these uncanny works we can experience a sensorial displacement that is both playful and profound.

Extracted from exhibition catalogue The Uncanny: Adeline de Monseignat and Berndnaut Smilde, Published by Ronchini Gallery, 2012