Laurence Vallières started life in Québec City in 1986, but she’s made cardboard her passport. These days she shapes mammoths, apes, and creatures you didn’t know you needed—out of recycled boxes, refuse, and imagination. Sculpture, public art, political rumblings—they all fold together in her practice.

Training in Montreal, Québec City, and California (plus residencies abroad), Vallières has stitched her technical chops across many materials. But cardboard has become her signature. She pulls packing boxes from the streets, collects discarded flaps, folds, layers—and lets those humble textures become skin on gigantic animals. The scale draws you in; the material reminds you of the fragility beneath.

One of her iconic works is the “Menagerie” of cardboard creatures. These animals don’t just sit; they loom with personality. A gorilla, a rhinoceros, beasts in precarious stances—each built to feel alive, even though they’re made of something meant to be tossed away. She makes sculptures that tell stories about human behavior by leaning into metaphor. Each tilt of a head, each bold eye or formed flap, hints at what we mirror when we think we’re really looking at “just an animal.”

Her art talks politics without shouting. Using animal imagery lets her explore human relationships, communication, corporate power, and environmental decay. When she built a scene featuring Mickey Mouse over a fallen triceratops at Urvanity in Madrid, it wasn’t nothing—it was tension, critique, beauty folded into a cardboard skin.

What’s lovely is how she treats waste as witness. The cardboard isn’t background—it’s voice. Every torn edge, every corrugated line, every label still visible—these come through in her sculptures. They remind us that even in what we discard there lies influence, identity, and possibility.

Her large-scale installations have shown up on streets and festivals around the world: from Burning Man to fairs in Europe and public parks that weren’t expecting beasts to walk through. And the animals she creates carry weight: weight in metaphor, weight in presence. They force the viewer to reconsider what “natural” means when humans have interrupted so many ecosystems.

Laurence’s work is both cuddle-soft and knobby-rough. Cute shapes, sure—but they often conceal sharp observations. When you look close, the joy of seeing gives way to a slow ache. But it’s precisely there—between delight and discomfort—that her art lives.

If you want your curiosity awakened and your heart stirred, take a closer look at her universe. Visit lauvallieres.com to see her beasts in cardboard, and see what the discarded has been dancing through all this time.