RESIDENCIES
RESIDENCY #3
METAMORPHOSIS SIGNALS
Designers:
SIGVE KNUTSON
AUDREY LARGE
SIGVE KNUTSON
Sigve Knutson (Norway, 1991) obtained an MA in Contextual Design at Design Academy Eindhoven in 2016. He is now based in Oslo and has had several solo shows in cities like Milan, Athens, Beirut and Copenhagen. His practice is motivated by a fascination for the intuitive and raw rather than the smoothened and planned.
sigveknutson.com
AUDREY LARGE
Audrey Large (France, 1994) is a designer based in the Netherlands. After graduating with Cum Laude from the Master Social Design at the Design Academy in Eindhoven in 2017, she joined the post-academic program of the Jan Van Eyck Academie (NL). In a context of exponential digitization, she positions her practice in an interdisciplinary form of design that uses digital cinema and image theory as a field of research to reconsider object design methodologies.
s710959515.onlinehome.fr
RESIDENCY #3
METAMORPHOSIS SIGNALS
TURIN, ITALY
DUPARC CONTEMPORARY SUITES
2022
A year-long project started with a residency in Turin, Italy, and culminated in the production of a collection of works and the publication of a monograph book on each designer.
METAMORPHOSIS SIGNALS
“Nothing lasts like change”
Karl Ludwig Börne
“It is almost banal to say so yet it needs to be stressed continually: all is creation, all is change, all is flux, all is metamorphosis”
Henry Miller
Metamorphosis: a change in the form or nature of a material singularity that can be linked to an individual or other subject. Signs of metamorphosis are clues that anticipate or accompany transformations, changes in form and substance that help reshape, reformulate, and redefine that upon which they intervene.
We analyze metamorphosis with the idea and the will to develop a potential mapping of the outcomes it produces but also to deepen – and perhaps reveal – some of the substantial reasons that determined it; recognizing the shifts that lead to the alteration of an original identity means participating in the process of change – sometimes imperceptible, in other cases radical – in order to be able to describe, define and perhaps understand it. The wonder and the enigma of metamorphosis concern the evolutionary or involutionary processes linked to the concept of change, but also of transience and even transfiguration, always dealing with what is animated, in movement, not in stasis: in extreme synthesis, metamorphosis concerns everything that exists and inhabits the world of our existence.
The residency program is inaugurated with a stay in Turin: a series of visits and meetings give the designers the opportunity to get in touch with the city, proposing some useful clues for a first definition of its identity profile; which of these can be connected to the concept of metamorphosis? Which signals reveal most frequently and incisively the theme of change? How can the principles of “metamorphosis” or of “notify the change” be interpreted or represented – even in a symbolic key – by resorting to the art of design? According to which “artifacts” or “interpretative tools”? Using which primitive or advanced technologies?
THE OUTCOMES
Sigve Knutson
Log Scriber: Metamorphosis Signals
Made in a single piece and as a specific outcome of his residency, Knutson’s work is a sculpture-structure with ambiguous and unsettling characters, a Cabinet de curiosités in which the presence of finds from the natural
and artificial universes meet and compare.
The wall-mounted vertical plank is an element in carved elm root, smoothed and waxed by hand, an emblem of nature; its organic shape welcomes concavities that have the same enigmatic nature of some ancient rock niches, negative spaces dedicated to the votive display of symbolic artifacts. In the depths of these wooden hollows are placed ten presences in 925 silver, artificial creatures intended as hybrid tools or ritual jewels, inert bodies capable of evoking the liveliness of a matter that incorporates the signs of its own transformation and
metamorphosis.
Audrey Large
Metamorphosis Signals
The residency gave Large the opportunity to introduce new ingredients of experimentation in her already established theoretical-practical grammar. The impression of a spark of light that underpins this new work is derived from observation of a series of mirrors during the visits made during the residency. In the multiplication of luminescent reflections on the mirroring surfaces of the Baroque buildings of Turin, the concept arises of the threshold between two adjacent domains, one material, the other immaterial.
The “signals of metamorphosis” designed by Audrey Large make their way in the form of lamps. Their volume is originally shaped in a digital context, then transferred into physical form through an additive production process. Some of these solid masses are transparent, others are opaque, and on their surfaces PBR (Physically Based Rendering) patterns are applied, virtual textures that emulate the appearance of materials in a realistic way.