Audrey Large’s “ambiguous” design between the virtual and the real

“Liquidity, dissolution, transition, morphing. I like when contours dissolve, when there is no real boundary between the viewer and the object and the air in between”, French Netherlands-based artist and designer Audrey Large tells Domus, effectively summarising her work in a few words. Born in Toulouse in 1994, and currently working in Eindhoven, through her research Large gathers together all of the key issues of the digital era, developing an aesthetic that lies in a space where the virtual and the real meet each other. Since earning a master’s degree in social design at Design Academy Eindhoven in 2017, the artist developed her practice through digital image manipulation, often combined with digital fabrication processes such as “drawing, modelling, 3d printing, all blending together in my method, with no specific order”. In doing so, she managed to challenge the matter itself and, as a result, to trick the eyes of the beholder into an uncertain state of visual perception, in which the physical object becomes a hybrid, a sort of pretext that questions the fine line between materiality and immateriality.  

For Large, virtual and real don't oppose each other, as they are part of the same continuum. “Also, binarism is reducing and not representative of actual ways of being and navigating the living experience. I prefer to think in terms of multiplicity and continuity rather than binaries and opposition. I try to convey this with ideas in the objects I make but also explore it in the design method/process”, she comments. Once the dichotomous opposition is overcome, an unexplored realm of possibilities starts to unveil, as we set off on a sort of metaphysical journey. 

Audrey Large

It all starts with a simple question: what is matter? What do we consider as real and granted? “I like to challenge that on the very banal/simple/immediate aspect of the material and the perception”, says Large. “I am always looking for ambiguity, and looking for the openness of a piece. When things don't totally reveal themselves, when you think you understand them and suddenly they are slipping away. When you are not sure anymore. Again, it is not about bringing confusion and chaos on the level of the material, maybe it is more about embracing the fact that confusion is part of everything, and trying to overcome it was reassuring static objects might just be a little band-aid to hide the embarrassment of not knowing how to be”. 

In 2017, Large presented her diploma project Life.vfx at the Design Academy Eindhoven. At the core of this work are most of the concepts that were further developed in her career. 3D-printed images of everyday objects are subjected to a series of manipulations: “I was filming myself using daily life objects such as a carafe”, tells the designer, “gather motion tracking data of my use of the object and apply these data on the 3D scan of the same original object – I would then obtain a glitched model, that I would 3d print. And start again the same process, until obtaining a transformation line of glitched carafes. In a backstage set-up, the motion capture of the stunt-designer transforms stereotypical shapes and movements into new entities. They are the unexpected results of the attempt to alter images from reality”.

Audrey Large

Soon the concepts of “doubt”, glitch and embracing chaos as part of the creative process brought the designer to the Implicit Surfaces series, in which Large – drawing on the computer with a graphic tablet – starts sculpting and 3D printing her firsts Metaobjects, pieces of uncanny design with a unique aesthetic that draws from a digital/alien-like realm. Funny thing is, this form is only possible through human “error”: “I am embracing the fluidity, the imperfection in the shape”, states Large. “It makes it more human. 

The objects might feel unreal, they might disturb perception, but they still feel very touching, and close in a way. I think it is because they are not abstract forms, and because you can feel the human touch in the shapes”. At the end of the day, it is in a space of “ambiguity” that the artist finds the ground to carry on her experimentation. “In my work”, concludes the young designer, “I am trying to exhaust this entwinement on the very trivial level of the matter – it comes in through perceptual ambiguity, but also from the very methodology that ambiguity the status of the file and the role of the designer, whose role is to blend image making techniques to digital fabrication”.

Opening image: Audrey Large, photo Alaa Abu Asad