Diane Appaix-Castro is a French and Spanish sculptor and experiential installation artist, born in Paris, raised in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and based in New Orleans since 2019. Growing up at the intersection of multiple cultures-and having traveled extensively-she became attuned early on to the coexistence of conflicting truths. This awareness forms the foundation of her practice, which explores the systems humans create to understand and interact with the world(s) they inhabit, and how those systems shape perception.
Diane’s work probes the boundaries of knowledge and comprehension, subverting sensory expectations and questioning dominant narratives. Her immersive installations—combining unconventional materials, sculpture, projection, and audio—are designed to challenge how we make meaning. She invites viewers to reconsider humanity’s self-appointed role as the universal reference point and to cultivate a deeper sensitivity to other beings, the planet, the cosmos, and the unknowable.
Central to her philosophy is the belief that the viewer becomes sculpture—an active, three-dimensional presence that completes the circuit of the work. Through installation, Diane transforms observation into participation. The viewer is not simply a witness but a co-creator of meaning, embedded in the piece as a living component of its structure and purpose.
Her artistic inquiry draws from diverse disciplines: marine biology, astronomy, religious systems, philosophy, and sociopolitical and environmental issues. These varied influences, filtered through a multicultural lens, shape her ability to reconcile contradiction, and generate empathy across perspectives. Diane’s installations do not seek resolution. Instead, they open space for inquiry, valuing questions that lead to further questions over conclusions or certainty.
She resists absolutes, wary of any single worldview that claims full authority. Her experience navigating opposing truths has led her to favor multiplicity and nuance. Her work invites viewers to stretch beyond themselves—to temporarily let go of what is known or comfortable, in order to engage with something deeper, stranger, and less easily defined.
Rather than guiding viewers to fixed interpretations, Diane’s installations offer an experience of suspension—where knowledge is incomplete, and the unknown is allowed to remain intact. She encourages a shift in posture: from seeking mastery over the unfamiliar to forming a more intrinsic connection with it, even without full comprehension. This approach aims to foster curiosity, humility, and empathy—qualities necessary for engaging with difference, ambiguity, and mystery.
By immersing the viewer in multisensory environments and integrating them as part of the sculptural landscape, Diane creates spaces where perception is expanded, not resolved. Her work becomes a quiet yet powerful invitation to imagine new ways of understanding—not through certainty, but through openness to the unknown.