Aurelie Rousseau is a French visual artist and writer exploring presence, memory, and emotional perception through watercolour, photography, video, and text. Her work evokes a longing for slowness, reverence, and embodied awareness. In May 2026, she joins Studio 88 Artist Residency’s Evolving Identities programme, and will develop an inquiry into femininity as a lived, embodied, and shifting experience.
Aurelie traces what lingers beneath the visible—those subtle, often overlooked sensations that shape how we relate to ourselves, to others, and to the world. Her work does not seek to reconstruct the past, but rather to evoke a shared nostalgia for ways of being that feel both distant and intimately known: slowness, reverence for the Earth, and a return to presence over performance.
There is a softness in Rousseau’s approach, yet it carries a persistent undercurrent of longing—a search for something unnamed but deeply felt. Her images and writings unfold as fragments of attention, inviting viewers into a more contemplative rhythm where beauty and emotion become agents of reconnection. In this space, the personal becomes collective, and the ephemeral becomes a site of quiet recognition.
Rousseau’s path into artistic practice emerges from a background in business and economics, having worked with international organisations including the United Nations, as well as in NGOs and the technology sector focused on education and emerging markets. Over time, the acceleration and demands of these environments led her to step away, choosing instead to cultivate a life grounded in creativity, community, and stillness. Since early 2025, she has committed fully to her artistic practice, allowing a more intuitive and authentic mode of living and making to unfold.
During her residency at Studio 88, Rousseau will develop an inquiry into femininity as a lived, embodied, and shifting experience. Her project centres on the moment femininity becomes sovereign—not as a fixed identity, but as a sensorial intelligence that moves through the body and responds to context. Drawing from personal transformation, she reflects on how qualities once perceived as hesitation or withdrawal may in fact hold deeper layers of awareness—linked to safety, desire, pleasure, and the capacity to receive life in its complexity.
Through an exploratory, process-led approach, Rousseau will work fluidly between mediums, allowing form to emerge organically from experience. Her research asks: what happens when feminine power encounters systems of domination? What unfolds after sovereignty is remembered? And what might the body know of femininity that the mind has long forgotten?
The resulting body of work—interweaving visual and written elements—will offer an intimate yet resonant articulation of femininity as both personal journey and collective condition, aligning closely with the Evolving Identities programme’s focus on transformation, perception, and the continuous becoming of self.
More about Aurelie Rousseau on her website.
Studio 88 accepts applications on an ongoing basis. Check out our residency program and apply now.
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