Born in Algeria, Dupre grew up in Paris, London, and Glasgow, with much of her limited, formal education completed in the confines of several scattered schools. A self-described “hell-raising-know-it-all” in her youth, she spent time traveling across Europe, indulging in a transient lifestyle she seemed well suited for, which came with its own set of eclectic adventures that impacted her collage work later on.
Like the time when, while hitchhiking from Italy to France, she rode along with a cocaine trafficker who liberally sampled his goods while driving, and swerving through picturesque mountains, narrowly avoiding crashing the car several times. Dupre also barely escaped the Swiss bunker of a woman, part-witch, part-survivalist, who was convinced the world was about to end. In Rotterdam, she was chased off by a gang of scooter thugs.
“Perhaps seeing so many places was something like living inside of a morphing collage,” she says.
“All these characters, almost unreal, I still remember their expression and I am sure it must influence my portraiture.”
Throughout her adventures, Dupre dabbled in various forms of art like drawing and animation, working alongside other painters, sculptors, filmmakers and musicians while they shared coffee and the opportunity to discuss technique and art.
It was here, in a fostering, informal environment built on creativity that she really obtained her practical education, setting the groundwork for the development of her collage craft.
“These years had a large impact on my attitude and art, and continue to influence me,” she says. “Having the memory of so many techniques, helps very much not just my art, but also in repairing things and finding solutions to problems.”
Though she first began working exclusively with papier-mache, 2-D patterns increasingly intrigued her. Using the glossy pages of fashion magazines she found perfect for papier-mache, she realized the accidental patterns she was creating in 3-D shapes would work with flatter surfaces, too.
Often on a shoe-string budget, she wasn’t particularly fussy about choosing material, picking up whatever magazines and publications she could find in studios, or for free.
She soon also found that collage-making was a very natural and intuitive process for her, with “every color and texture you could already want existing around us in the print world,” she says.
In their completed state, Dupre’s works look painstakingly intricate, perhaps even complicated, but the process to get them there is fairly simple and straightforward.
After printing an image a suitable number of times on the right kind of paper, Dupre begins building the collage, modifying the image by enlarging or cropping it a number of times depending on the particular idea she’s expanding on. The imagery, while being transformed into a certain, wildly fragmented version of its former self, is not without calculations, as pieces of paper are carefully marked and positioned over a sketch.
If the work changes direction by itself,” Dupre says, “I reflect and most often follow the accidental movement to its natural or surprising conclusion.”
But sometimes even the most rigid of measurements can’t stand in the way of independently spawned paths her work takes while being assembled on to the surfaces she’s working on.
“If the work changes direction by itself,” Dupre says, “I reflect and most often follow the accidental movement to its natural or surprising conclusion.”
The time it takes for her to complete the pieces varies—sometimes a few days, sometimes over a month. When she’s finished, she’s left with a studio overflowing with the remnants of cut patterns and paper, scattered from her desk to the floor.
The most time consuming, intense and detailed pieces she has made so far involved a group of abstract works for an exhibition at CES contemporary in Laguna Beach.
First selling at small exhibitions in Glasgow, which is where her studio was based, her earlier exploding collages and political portraiture attracted attention, and she was soon sending the odd piece to collectors in the U.S. while making sales through her website.
“I think people like to see a portrait where they recognize the subject,” she says. “For a while I wanted to only produce work based on current geopolitical headlines. I still like this idea, to only produce work strictly connected to what the viewer was probably reading about a few days earlier, something really connected to reality, but viewed through warped glass.”
The internet, she says, has opened up an entire new customer and fan base, allowing her to realize that as long as she had an internet connection, she never had to stay in one place.