“I am moved by the question of the surface and its potential to be a fictitious and ambiguous substance upon which reality as well as hyperreality can be located” – Audrey Large
Audrey Large’s ‘The Waters In Between’ towers over us, dripping warped elegance. It is all at once a baroque fountain, amorphous gel and 4D object afloat in 3D space. This impossible totem seems only half real. It’s as if one poorly timed breeze might send it hurtling back to its own world. It is made of vibrant matter, constructed using a CGI software usually reserved for character creation to build and distort structural modules. The resulting file: a translation of a translation, an export of a compression until it is made physical in a 3D print and its rendered modules are assembled.
The work is an artefact from a digital environment, it seems to be stuck between states. This digital form bleeds into our world as corn-based bioplastic and polymers that only solidify when exposed to light. The artist advocates for a new relationship to material, to disturb the way design dictates behaviour. She argues that an experience of an object depends on how it is encountered – each new encounter stacking itself on the last. As these encounters reshape it, she believes that “Instead of focusing on what’s real, what’s not, what’s the original, what’s the source? […] we should embrace the fact that matter, entities and identities are meant to travel”.
Audrey Large | b. 1994, France
Audrey Large is a French designer based in the Netherlands. She graduated with Cum Laude from the Design Academy of Eindhoven (NL), MA Social Design, in 2017.