Steel is a forgiving material. If I cut something, I can weld it back together. If I bend something with heat, I can return it to its previous shape — not seamlessly, but that’s the point. I want the decisions to be indelible.
My sculptures begin as flat sheets. The curves and shapes emerge from removing material from a plane, from heat, from the mark of what was tried and reconsidered. Some welds stay visible. The process stays in the work.
Each piece rests on a small, precise point. Most elements move when you touch them — I want you to touch them. Walk around. The sculpture has more than one shape; it rewards the step it takes to find out. A new angle, a new surface, a new color catches the light differently. That’s intentional.
The forms come from a question I’ve been living with for a long time: what does it feel like to hold irresolvable forces — rigidity and flexibility, stability and change — without collapsing the tension into a resolution? I grew up across British, German, and American contexts, watching how pressure accumulates around identity, how people navigate what they’re expected to become. The sculptures don’t illustrate that. But they come from it.
Equilibrium, in this work, is not a destination. It is a practice — intentional, ongoing, staying in the question.
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.
