A visual artist whose primary medium is light, Félicie d’Estienne d’Orves creates installations and performances that draw on a phenomenological understanding of reality and question the conditioning of our gaze. In her work, light is both tool and subject. She is interested in how light and its speed define the boundaries of physical and cosmological space. Space itself becomes her material, through which she explores our fields of perception.

In the spirit of 1970s Land Art, she explores space as a terra incognita, as in Continuum (Centre Pompidou, 2019), a panoramic screen reconstruction of a Martian sunset. Her solo exhibitions Soleils Martiens (2022 at Le Lieu Unique in Nantes) and Sortir au jour (at Maubuisson Abbey in 2023) explore the life cycle of matter and the horizons shaped by the evolution of our astrophysical knowledge.

Her permanent public artworks, created at the scale of a city — such as Atome primitif in Leuven (as part of the Nouveaux Commanditaires, 2021) or for the Parc des Expositions station (Tandems du Grand Paris projects) — transpose cosmological landscapes into the human scale of walking.

Her work has been presented at the Centre Pompidou, Nuit Blanche, Le Centquatre – 104, La Fabrique Agnès b. (Paris), Le Fresnoy – Studio national (Tourcoing), Fondation Vasarely (Aix-en-Provence), Abbaye de Maubuisson (Saint-Ouen-l’Aumône), during the 500th anniversary of Le Havre, State Studio (Berlin), Watermans Arts Center (London), New Art Space / Sonic Acts (Amsterdam), TBA Teatro do Bairro Alto (Lisbon), Ars Electronica (Linz), Elektra Festival (Montreal), Day For Night (Houston), OCAT (Shanghai), Aram Art Museum, Jeju Biennale (South Korea), New Media Gallery (Vancouver), and more.