About

I am Anna-Isabelle Gabrielle Bruey-Sedano, a sculptor completing my MFA at San Francisco State University and holding a BFA from Concordia University in Montréal, Québec. My work examines the intersections of industrial systems, domestic environments, and the body. I use steel, aluminum, latex, and ceramics to explore how materials embody social values and how built objects influence identity, behavior, and power.

My practice centers on the tension between function and non-function. I transform materials associated with industry, architecture, and the body into forms that resist their expected roles, hovering between utility and abstraction. Metals such as steel and aluminum invoke strength, labor, and permanence. In contrast, latex and ceramics introduce vulnerability, intimacy, and fragility. Bringing these materials into dialogue foregrounds the negotiations we perform within built environments and exposes the socio-political structures embedded in everyday objects.

A core component of my work is the reinterpretation of familiar domestic and industrial forms of furniture, tools, appliances as sculptural artifacts. These objects are not neutral; they carry cultural expectations about durability, convenience, efficiency, and care. By manipulating, distorting, or destabilizing their familiar shapes, I highlight the tension between their functional origins and the ideological roles they play in daily life. The rawness of industrial materials evokes a post-industrial world shaped by mass production and consumer desire, challenging the polished aesthetics of domestic design.

My background in anthropology informs this inquiry. Treating objects as cultural artifacts, I examine how material design mirrors systems of value, labor, and desire. My work bridges visual art and social research, revealing the often-unseen relationships between people and the objects that structure their lives.

Ultimately, my practice seeks to reimagine function itself. Exposing objects not as passive tools, but as sites where power, identity, and social expectations take shape. By suspending materials between reliability and failure, strength and vulnerability, I create forms that invite viewers to reconsider the values embedded in the environments they inhabit. 

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My research investigates the relationships between industrial systems, domestic environments, and the body through sculptural experimentation with steel, aluminum, latex, and ceramics. I examine how everyday objects function as cultural artifacts shaped by systems of labor, power, and consumer expectation. Through material intervention, I explore the tensions between function and non-function, questioning how utilitarian forms regulate behavior and encode social values.

At the center of my research is the transformation of familiar domestic and industrial structures, furniture, tools, and appliances into these objects that hover between utility and abstraction. Industrial metals evoke architectures of stability, labor, and control, while latex and ceramics introduce fragility, memory, and bodily reference. Together, these materials construct a framework in which strength and vulnerability, reliability and failure, coexist. These material relationships offer a methodology for understanding the socio-political pressures embedded in the environments we inhabit.

My background in anthropology shapes my approach to material as evidence of cultural systems. I treat material behavior such as imprinting, collapsing, sagging, resisting as a form of knowledge production that reveals how designed objects shape identity, movement, and social expectation. Latex functions as a surface of memory, capturing the traces of touch and pressure; ceramics embody the tension between domestic utility and structural fragility; metals reveal both the authority and the limitations of engineered function. Through these investigations, I highlight how the built environment mediates experiences of care, control, and belonging.

As a French and first-generation American artist, my research is also informed by themes of displacement, negotiation, and hybridity. Several works engage changeability, imbalance, or incomplete structure, reflecting the fluidity of cultural identity and the instability of assumed function. By destabilizing familiar forms, my practice challenges conventional understandings of design and utility, foregrounding the ways objects participate in shaping social behavior and constructing lived space.

Ultimately, my research aims to reimagine domestic and industrial forms not as neutral tools but as active sites where personal history, institutional forces, and material agency intersect. Through sculpture, I make visible the systems that shape both objects and bodies, offering new ways to understand the relationships between materiality, power, and everyday life.