To watch Cascade’s promotional trailer, currently available on Fabrica’s website, you could be forgiven for thinking that Stéphane Cauchy’s kinetic installation harboured some kind of monster.

As the gallery’s otherwise silent and still atmosphere is torn apart by a roaring sound, it’s necessary to remind yourself it is just falling water, such is the ferocity of its snarl.

Six metal buckets hang suspended from a pulley system above a narrow pool of water. Pipes fill each one until a certain tipping point causes the bucket to flip its contents into the trough below, before being sucked back up to repeat the process.

The result is a constant, interweaving rhythm of crash and fall; a dull peal of bells which suits Fabrica’s environs down to the ground.

“I like when there is a particular architecture to do something with. I can use its possibilities. I did a similar piece in an old chapel a lot like Fabrica that used the same principle,” explains the French sculptor.

“The possibility there was its huge ceiling. There was a bucket fixed 12 metres high so you could see the water fall down from such height. The place makes the piece.”

Having built small cars as a child, Cauchy’s fascination with mechanics – and drills – started early.

However, following two years as a graphic designer, he decided it was time to go back to square one and start again.

“I really needed to learn how to draw. I didn’t really know how. I learned a little during those two years but it wasn’t enough. So I spent one year in Paris in a workshop where we would only drawin a very academic way,” he explains.

“We would look at an object and draw it. That was all we did for a whole year. After that I went to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts just outside Lille. My original idea wasn’t to make artwork but actually to get my drawing to be freer – I was still very academic in my work.

“My first year I spent drawing, painting and having fun. It was anything but academic. It was a case of do whatever you want but do something.”

Cauchy began exploring tri-dimensional works, incorporating simple yet effective mechanisms to make kinetic sculptures.

“One of my first pieces had things on top of each other – it would move like a mobile. That was really the starting point for my kinetic work,” he says.

“I’m still doing that now, using different physical phenomena wherever I can.”

Influenced by Italian artist Anselmo Giovanni, whose works with stone, metal and wood explore themes of energy, gravity, space and time, Cauchy is fascinated by the idea of things that cannot be touched or grasped.

Whether visitors to the gallery take away this intangible theme or instead focus on the relationship between science, natural water cycles and philosophy, Cauchy chiefly hopes the piece’s reflective nature will capture people’s imagination in a personal way.

“When I do something, people can make whatever they want of it. The point is that when you look at the mechanism, you see how it works. That’s the first thing you try to understand,” he says.

“After that, just looking at the installation is somehow close to meditation. It’s entirely down to different people, but the meditation will make them look at themselves. A mechanism can work in a physical way and a metaphysical way – there are a lot of parallels between that interaction.”

* Open Wednesday to Saturday, 12pm to 5.30pm, Sunday 2pm to 5pm, free. A series of events dealing with issues and themes raised in Cauchy’s work will also take place throughout the installation’s run, visit www.fabrica.org.uk for more info.