Valérie Hadida is a contemporary French sculptor and painter, working mainly in Bronze and clay. This set of sculptures is from Les "petites bonnes femmes"/ The Little Women series, which has been described by critics as a “poetic encounter….[meant] to make us travel the path of women from adolescence to maturity and through the various emotions and moods that drive these generations of women".
Trained at l’Ecole d’arts plastiques et publicité de la ville de Paris (EMSAT) and employed in the studio of Marielle Polska for 6 years, a character designer for several animated features and winner of the Paul Ricard Foundation Prize in 1991, she has been Exhibited in galleries since 1990. Her sculpture artworks resembles a very strong sense of melancholic femininity.
Below you can read an interview with her:
How did you enter the world animation?
My entry into the world of animation was achieved through meetings. For a long time, I knew that I wanted to live drawing, but how to concertize it? Maybe by making illustrations ...
Above all my parents opened me to art. My mother and father gave me a piece of clay or a block of plaster and we had fun sculpting it. But they never encouraged me in this way. On the contrary, my mother preferred that I commit to a more structured job as a teacher of drawing. A vocation that I kept for a long time but did not correspond to me at all.
So I did a school of illustration and advertising without knowing what I was destined for and I realized that advertising did not fascinate me. It was really by chance that I met a facilitator who worked on Asterix. At the time, there were no big schools like goblins and cartoon in France was nothing. For me, the entertainment was Walt Disney and the US but I did not want to go there!
Did you imagine one day to be able to make your artistic work your career? When did you feel like an artist?
No, in the beginning what was important at 20 was to leave the family nest and find a job above all to be independent. Only then did I find my vocation as an artist and what I wanted to do to make a living. I learned by chance the craft of animation ... Today my specialty is to adapt comic characters or create them. It's my function and I love it!
To be an artist is to be free and make a living with it; that's what I'm doing now, sharing my time between animation and sculpture.
Looking back, dont you consider yourself an artist from the beginning?
I did not make this journey. I was very young and innocent and I think there are many women who like me did not dare to put themselves forward. It is the experience of life that leads you to verbalize things.
I am first a designer and therefore an artist. It comes gradually, it is necessary to take confidence in oneself. When I needed to show my sculptures I realized that people's eyes on my works were the opposite of what I imagined !! People encouraged me, reacted and it's the best school. When you look at others, that's why we keep going, insisting, trying.
