My sculptures investigate what it feels like to hold irresolvable forces — tension, flexibility, the ongoing negotiation between stability and change. The forms emerge from that inquiry: I cut contours from flat steel, voids as deliberate as the metal that remains, weight distributed until it reads as lightness.
Welds and marks stay visible. I want you to see where decisions were made.
The pieces rest on small, precise points. Most elements move when you touch them — not as invitation, but as argument. Setting something carefully balanced into motion is the work. Motion and equilibrium aren’t opposites here. The sculpture holds both.
I grew up across British, German, and American contexts, watching how people navigate pressure to become something fixed. This work comes from that — and from the conviction that equilibrium is not a destination but a practice
International Sculpture Center, Texas Sculpture Group, Texas Society of Sculptors, Women & Their Work Member Artist, Visual Artist Association (UK), City of San Antonio Prequalified Artist List
Andrea La Valleur-Purvis is a British-American sculptor working in steel, with a practice that spans intimate pedestal-scale works to large public installations.
Born in Cambridge, England to a British father and American mother, La Valleur-Purvis grew up in central Germany, where European modernism, architecture, and the built landscape shaped her eye from an early age. At five, her work was included in an exhibition at the Mathildenhöhe — one of her first encounters with art as something that could carry real weight in the world. At eighteen, she moved to the United States, where she studied sculpture at the College of Visual Arts in Saint Paul, Minnesota, earning a BFA in Sculpture in 1999.
Before returning to the studio full-time, she spent nearly two decades working across analog and digital creative environments with leading tech brands — years that sharpened her thinking about form, communication, and the relationship between structure and meaning. A period of solo world travel and five years living in Barcelona deepened her understanding of identity as something made and remade across place and time. That understanding lives in her sculptures.
La Valleur-Purvis launched her sculpture practice in Waco, Texas in 2022. Her first public installations for the City of Waco followed in 2023. In 2025, she was recognized with the Artistic Merit Award from the Luxembourg Art Prize and the Art 100 VAA International Prize, and her work has been featured in Glasstire, NPR Radio, and Cohart Magazine. Her sculptures — pedestal-scale to large outdoor — are held in private, corporate, and public collections throughout Texas, with work exhibited at the Marfa Invitational and galleries across the state.
She lives and works in Waco, Texas.
