Marie-Ange Guilleminot

Marie-Ange Guilleminot was born in Saint-Germain-en-Laye in 1960 and lives and works in Paris. 

Transformation lies at the heart of Marie-Ange Guilleminot’s practice, shaping the objects, garments, spaces, and situations she creates. Through subtle interventions, everyday actions become shared aesthetic and sensory experiences, emphasizing change, movement, and participation. Objects occupy a central place in her work, taking on new functions and shifting between the status of utilitarian item and artwork. This approach is exemplified by Cauris (1944–97), a work that transforms the form of a cowrie shell into a wearable backpack, activated through the artist’s participatory Salons de Transformations (1999). Developed across an international exhibition practice, Guilleminot’s work explores the object as a site of transformation, exchange, and human connection, reflecting her view of art as a living space that exists between the private and the public, the domestic and the museum. 

During her residency at Atelier Calder, Guilleminot continued a project begun in 1999 based on the shoe collection of the Bata Shoe Museum in Toronto. Combining artistic inquiry with a methodical, research-based approach, she documented each shoe in profile at a consistent scale before developing a series of prototype resin soles that reinterpreted the historical forms. The residency provided an opportunity to extend her investigation into the transformation of functional objects, translating archival research into sculptural experimentation.