Mathilde Pellé

Mathilde Pellé was born in 1987 and lives and works in the Cher region of France. Graduating from the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in 2012, she continued her studies in the SAIL group at ENSAD lab until 2015, where she conducted a study on the perception of volumes. At the same time, she set up her studio in the village of Morogues, where she grew up. Her first small-scale productions are presented at Paris Design Week, D'days, Venice Design and by the VIA and Tools galleries.

From 2016, she focused her work primarily on her research projectSoustraire (to subtract, to remove). She then began to question materialpresences and their effects, and to study existing subtractive models.Her varied practices (experiments applied to materials, objectsand needs, writing, photography, surveys, theoretical studies, ...) all take partin questioning accepted forms of everyday life, and help to ask this central question: Why is there something rather than less? In 2017, the Saint-Etienne International Design Biennial hosted the firstexperimental project Soustraire, les objets disparaissent. In 2018, Marie Pok,director of the CID in Grand-Hornu, brings an object resulting from this experimentation into her collections and invites Mathilde to take part in the "Halte à la croissance!" exhibition , where she develops the Une pénurie project. In 2019, the Deep Design Lab founded by the Pôle Recherche de la Cité du design de Saint-Étienne and the Ecole Urbaine de Lyon invites Mathilde to join its research studio. At the end of 2020, she created Maison soustraire, a comprehensive, interdisciplinary experiment in which she gradually removed 2/3of the material from the domestic environment she inhabited.

She is the first resident to be welcomed by the Eileen Gray association. Étoile de Mer. Le Corbusier, from September to October 2021, she will be living in one of the camping units on the Cap Moderne site, where she will be working on a technological detachment and her research project. In 2022, the scientific committee in charge of the XIIth Saint-Étienne International Design Biennial invited her to share her research methods. She then produced the content and scenography for her first solo exhibition, Maison soustraire, a posteriori. In 2024, the Fondation Martell presented the Soustraire research approach in a dedicated exhibition: Chemin creux.

She has published in the magazines Décor (ENSAD & Presses du Réel), A°2021 (École Urbaine de Lyon), Azimuts #54 (Cité du design - Saint-Étienne) and Issue #12 (HEAD - Geneva). She is regularly invited to present her work at conferences. ENSA Limoges, ESA Saint-Luc, EESAB Brest, ENSA Dijon, ISDAT Toulouse, EBABX and ESADTPM have called on her to run workshops for their students.