Camille Provost was born in Cote d'Ivoire in 2000 and spent her childhood moving between countries: Guinea, Brittany, Nairobi, Mali and Senegal, as conflict displaced her family twice. She returned to Cote d'Ivoire in time to finish high school, then moved to France in 2019 to study archaeology and art history at the Sorbonne. In 2023, with no formal training in applied or fine art, she was accepted by London's Royal College of Art and relocated to a Hackney studio.

Her practice, which she calls future archaeology, investigates how migration reshapes a person's sense of self. Provost describes herself as drawn to a West African philosophy of existence that treats time as non-linear, freeing her from plotting one straight line through her own history. Her enigmatic sculptures, assembled from woven rush fibre, ceramic and wood, carry the textures of a domestic world repeatedly fractured and put back together.

She first encountered sculpture while spending time in her late grandfather's mechanic's workshop in Brittany, and the pandemic pushed her to commit to art full time. Her debut exhibition came this January, following a residency at Project Loop in Hoxton, a cultural hub devoted to decolonising and diasporic narratives. Seven sculptural works in that show recalled household materials and unfinished puzzles.

The Paris connection came when Charlene Prempeh, founder of the creative agency A Vibe Called Tech, saw the debut and contacted Thomas Persson, creative director of Acne Paper. Acne Paper's exhibition space in the Palais Royal, a cultural initiative of the Swedish fashion house Acne Studios that opened in 2025, has previously hosted the ceramist Peter Schlesinger and the fashion photographer Jordan Hemingway.

Provost's second show, Le Masque et Le Vertige (Swear That You'll Play), opens on 22 October and runs to 20 December. She will invite visitors to handle and rearrange puzzle-like wooden and ceramic sculptures, making play itself the medium. She has said that joy is the driving force of her practice, and that accessible, joyful art reflects who she is.