David Challier (French, 1974 – Born in Grenoble and raised in the Alps Mountain) is an artist based between Dallas, Texas (USA) and Simiane-La-Rotonde, in the southern Alpes de Haute Provence (France). He currently serves as Invited Professor of Practice in Ceramics and Art at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, TX.

Working across glass, ceramics, and technological assemblage, Challier creates works that oscillate between ancient artifact and futuristic relic. Drawing from geology, archaeology, architecture, and ancestral knowledge, his art investigates the fragile equilibrium between creation and erosion, nature and machine. His inspirations—rocky deserts, modernist design, mid-century architecture, Arte Povera, and Conceptual Art—inform a practice rooted in transformation and metamorphosis.

His material research laboratory, based in a former decommissioned nuclear missile launching site in Simiane-La-Rotonde, provides both a physical and conceptual framework for his explorations. It is within this charged environment—once designed for destruction—that he conducts experiments in matter, energy, and rebirth.

Using rough materials collected from mountain and desert landscapes, Challier composes hybrid bodies that merge natural and industrial matter. In recent years, he has expanded his practice to incorporate machine guns, army devices, and computer components, reimagining them as archaeological traces of contemporary civilization. These technological relics become both instruments and symbols of human progress and decay.

Through cycles of fragmentation, recycling, and reconstruction, Challier’s works embody a profound tension between destruction and rebirth—sculptures that appear unearthed from a distant past or projected from a post-human future, standing at the intersection of geology, technology, and memory.