Audrey Giant sculpts bizarre supplies into extraordinary kinds

“I like fluid supplies that play with mild, whether or not they mirror or take in it, textures that can’t actually be described or grasped, and mixing contradictory supplies with unimaginable shapes,” says Audrey Giant, a French designer primarily based within the Netherlands.

Audrey’s portfolio spans a medley of lamps, showing like liquid obsidian with the best way they’ve oozed like lava and shaped into crystallised objects. You may additionally discover sculptural items which are so easy and amorphous; fashions of characters that may slot in your palm; and artworks fusing collectively in an surprising mixture of textures and patterns on gallery flooring and partitions.

She’s made large-scale sculptures for Nxt museum in Amsterdam (that is three metres excessive!), a chess set with designer Theophile Blandet, a light-weight collection referred to as Quark, and stamps made with Koos Breen for Publish NL. At first look, you would possibly assume these items are all digitally rendered, however their painterly shapes and luminous hues are in reality bodily objects, composed by means of a salad of instruments and software program.

Audrey grew up south of Toulouse and accomplished a BA in Product Design at ESAD in Reims, earlier than transferring to the Netherlands to pursue an MA on the Design Academy in Eindhoven. Right here, she honed her craft, studying the basics and growing the talents wanted to launch her personal unbiased observe.

“The Dutch faculty allowed me to broaden my imaginative and prescient of design and discover my very own voice,” she says. “I started to undertake a extra experimental strategy to things which, because of the mixture of digital instruments and digital manufacturing, rapidly took on a extra sculptural type.” This course of led to her curiosity in designing throughout a spread of mediums, together with works for galleries and museums, in addition to digital artwork, graphic design, and sculpture.

Whichever medium Audrey places her gifted thoughts to, relaxation assured, will probably be conceived in her signature fluid model and can typically be arduous to pin down with a definition. “A lot of my work focuses on gestures, actions, drawings and on discovering the exact second when ambiguity of the fabric turns into obvious,” she explains, citing photos, cinema and portray as a key inspiration.

When she’s not drawing from these visible references, she works intuitively together with her arms, constructing tactile sculptures riddled with emotion. “It is very a lot about setting an intention in a path or a perceptual impact, then investing in a state of instinct to look by means of gesture, observe and interplay till I nearly get there.”

After the concept is about, she is going to then get her head caught into analysis, which entails hand drawing on paper and 3D modelling on a pc. This tends to contain 3D modelling in sculpting mode or sculpting straight in digital actuality. One other route entails supplies analysis and experimentation to deliver the 3D recordsdata produced on the pc into the actual world, highlighting the floor results they create.

Audrey says, “Getting ready recordsdata for machines, 3D printing, post-processing, mould making, casting, meeting, packing – all of those processes aren’t clearly separated, and I might say that I spend lots of time coaching myself to ‘look’. The items take form within the workshop subsequent to me all through the design course of, which I regulate and prolong in parallel with the materialisation.”

Shifting past the bodily world, Audrey has additionally stepped into the brand new territory of digital actuality sculpting. Utilizing Binder Jetting in sand, a 3D printing know-how, allows her to create complicated designs with loads of freedom.

She’s additionally begun researching ladies’s information of well being and earth-related practices within the late Center Ages and Renaissance, a subject she finds fascinating. “There may be a lot to be taught from these oral traditions, most of which have been preserved in writing solely by means of summaries of witchcraft trials.” From this, she’s began exploring moulding methods and pigmented plaster drawing, a “very pictorial course of” that entails portray straight onto 3D-printed fashions with the fabric. “I can really feel the massive area for content material and materials analysis.”

We’re additionally excited to say that she’s making ready for a solo exhibition on the Van Oosteroom Gallery in Rotterdam, which can showcase a brand new collection of digital actuality sculptures and sand 3D-printed items titled Flowstones, plus a brand new set up of “ladies’s forgotten information” for the Noüs competition with BNF archives in Paris.