SHAPESHIFTING NATURE
Completed as a designer at Bodega Ltd. in 2021
as part of a visual podcast series for the project Salonnière.
The project Salonnière is a trend + culture experience that offers context by exploring themes through contemporary cultural + historical source material.
Through dialogue, we buttress themes and trends we see in the world in the form of audio recordings paired with artful videos.
This episode features a conversation between Bodega Ltd.’s Creative Director Liz Gardner, and Senior Designer Mad Lenaburg.
It focuses on recontextualizing nature in objects of culture.
full-length episode
We have a fascination with recontextualization. This is by definition “taking something from its usual context and resituating it in an unfamiliar context.”
In the visual podcast, we explore how objects of nature become objects of culture when they change medium and look at the linguistic implications of this transfer.
In an artists’ choice to replicate natural forms, there are a range of material properties to consider.
Some work evokes illusion by mimicking nature and deceiving in such likeness, whereas others reveal their artifice, without attempting to imitate so precisely.
Jean-Paul Gourdon chooses to render his work in white, whereas Dodie Thayer and Wedgewood take on original hues of the source inspiration.
In all three examples, cauliflower, lettuce and shells are still recognizable. The nameable organism survives the material translation.
SIGNIFIER / SIGNIFIED
If we look at this body of work through a linguistic lens, the preservation of natural, nameable traits is essential to the works’ success.
Studies of Structuralism and Poststructuralism in Linguistics are interested in the way meaning is communicated through signifying systems.
We define and name our world by designating a sound and image to a concept. The word “tree” and visualization of leafy branches supported by a trunk are associated with a specific mental idea. In Western culture, the relationship between signifier and signified is arbitrary. The letters forming the word “tree” do not resemble the concept. The signifier/signified relationship is not given by the world around us, but produced by the symbolizing system we learn.
The literary critic, Catherine Belsey, gives this example:
“How do we define nature? Not by reference to flowers and trees, probably, since they are found in parks and can be cultivated, but as wilderness, the absence of culture. By reference, in other words, to the term that is excluded by and from nature itself. And yet it is precisely from within culture that we are able to identify nature at all. The one term cannot be excluded from the meaning of the other. Meaning depends on difference.”
ORIGINAL + COPY
In a distinction between original and copy, context defines the roles.
The meaning of each depends on the trace of the other that inhabits its definition.
In 2019, Sotheby’s hosted a two-day auction of the French husband and wife duo Les Lalanne’s private collection. The 274 lot sold for $101 million.
In real sheep auctions, live ewes go for as low as $400 and Etsy sells Lalanne knock-offs for under $1,000.
François-Xavier Lalanne may have sought inspiration on the pasture (and used real wool), but his sheep are revered original works of art, backed by many arguments, including the price tag. And as an original, his sheep produce Etsy copies. Even in the pasture, a lamb takes on its mother’s genes. In any context, original and copy rely on each other.
DOUBLING OF THE BODY
For Yves Saint Laurent’s 1969 haute couture collection, Claude Lalanne made a series of galvanic copper casts of a supermodel.
The resulting sculptural jewelry, worn on fingertips and ears, transforms nature into adornment, and duplicates the body in metal on the wearer’s flesh. There is a replication yet contrast of copper on skin.
YSL’s SS 2021 Ready-to-Wear collection reissued versions of Lalanne’s wearable sculptures, continuing the celebration of our natural selves, but evoking whimsy and imagination in the interpretation.