Hélène Desplechin is a self-taught, French-born photographer, sculptor and painter based in Madrid. Alongside her personal work, she is a photographer at the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, where she carries out technical studies, documents conservation and restoration treatments, and photographically reproduces the museum's paintings.
She grew up in Africa, and that early light and openness still runs through her eye — a pull toward warm tones, wide horizons and the natural world that shows up again and again in her work.
Water runs through almost everything she makes — the liquid element, its distorting, dreamlike filter on things, the moods of the sea surface, dolphins and rays recurring across her photographs, paintings and ceramics alike. She's drawn to showing what's otherwise hard to see: stopping an instant, opening the viewer's eye to something new.
She works as readily with what she finds — driftwood, beach stones, weathered scraps of wood — as she does with clay, paint or a camera, drawn to the beauty already sitting in natural materials before she's added anything to them.
Her photography has been published in two books with Jacques Flament Éditions — Errances (2017), with writer Hans Limon, and Le Règne Aquatique (2016) — exhibited in Spain and France, and chosen for book covers published internationally. More on her collaborations, and more of her photography on Flickr.