This confrontation between the powerful animal from prehistoric times and the small, fragile but fearless human remains a favourite theme for me.

It's an image that works in many people's imaginations. How can we understand this? Is it the fascination that the animal world holds for us, both close and mysterious in our 'civilised' eyes?

Our ancestors, hunters and gatherers, necessarily needed their protein ration to survive, but they saw it as a natural exchange that was necessary for their survival. There was no such thing as a concentration camp for animals. As the Indian in the film Dead Man says, "My elk family took pity on me. A young moose gave me his life. With my knife I took his life".

We're a long way from that! Let's just imagine what these two, a little girl and an elephant, are saying to each other.

Sophie Verger is a fairy who knows how to transform an emotion into an animal, a sensation, a felling in a recollected memory. She also suggests to us with a lot of humor a lovable identification with the animal model and beyond this observation the fact that in all her work, the child alone has its place with her, spontaneously capable of including the existence of the animal in her own fundamental values.

Sophie Verger combines anthropomorphic beings with human characters, and she mixes the human and the animal world in surprising ways. Through these mutations, her universe becomes moving, unstable, something is falling apart and uncertainty is twisting in it like a rift.

Sophie Verger plays with the pure reason of the look and lies the opposition of her interpretation.

Beyond anthropomorphism there is also, often, the notion of games. With animal representations worthy of Pompon but going beyond a simple realistic look, Sophie Verger sculpts poems, whole tales in one piece...