Audrey Giant sculpts unusual supplies into extraordinary varieties

“I like fluid supplies that play with gentle, whether or not they replicate or take up it, textures that can’t actually be described or grasped, and mixing contradictory supplies with not possible shapes,” says Audrey Giant, a French designer based mostly within the Netherlands.

Audrey’s portfolio spans a medley of lamps, showing like liquid obsidian with the way in which they’ve oozed like lava and fashioned into crystallised objects. You will additionally discover sculptural items which can be so clean 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 lightweight collection referred to as Quark, and stamps made with Koos Breen for Submit NL. At first look, you may suppose these items are all digitally rendered, however their painterly shapes and luminous hues are the truth is bodily objects, composed by 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 shifting 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 apply.

“The Dutch college 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 method to things which, due to the mixture of digital instruments and digital manufacturing, shortly took on a extra sculptural type.” This course of led to her curiosity in designing throughout a variety 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, it is going to be conceived in her signature fluid fashion and can usually be onerous 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 pictures, cinema and portray as a key inspiration.

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

After the concept is ready, 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 information produced on the pc into the actual world, highlighting the floor results they create.

Audrey says, “Getting ready information for machines, 3D printing, post-processing, mould making, casting, meeting, packing – all of those processes will not be clearly separated, and I’d say that I spend a variety 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.”

Transferring 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 girls’s data of well being and earth-related practices within the late Center Ages and Renaissance, a subject she finds fascinating. “There’s a lot to study from these oral traditions, most of which have been preserved in writing solely by 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 house for content material and materials analysis.”

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