LEGO&CO

When you order lego bricks on their website, the headline is  "The only limit is your imagination!"  which sounds like a great challenge for your creativity! 

With these bracelet, I experimented with chains to create decorated metallic fringes playing with the multiples creative possibilities of lego material, at the same time, fixed and movable, gems and charms. 

One lego a day keep the doctor away 

A rolling lego gathers no moss

don't put all your legos in the same basket 

It's very hard to shave a lego 

Lego is the sinews of war 

Lego doesn't grow on tree 

There are plenty of lego in the sea 

Two legos are better than one 

...

you can complete the list…(it works alos with french proverbs!) 

My dad brought me thoses pictures from his trip to Sao Paulo. Melissa, the shoes brand had teamed up with LEGO and using over 700,000 pieces have come up with a conceptual, colourful lego facade inspired by the Melissa  Rainbow collection…creating an  amazing lego staircase. 

I like to have feedback on my necklaces, that people give their opinion or impressions about it.  Most of the time , it's something you didn't think about when you made the piece, as if the meaning always escaping from you when the work is done. One of my friend told me it referred for her to the Italian futuristic design of the After-War, and my Dad thought it was inspired  by Aztec aesthetic. Anyway  i like both interpretations.  

What is yours? 

For a workshop with my MA in Polverigi (Italy) around the notion of site specific performance (performance that you create from a space) I involved my last lego necklace into my "site specific installation". 

I placed it in the fountain of the park of the villa where we where staying. (at least now i know that it is waterproof!). The distortion produced by the swirl of the water and the reflection of the sun on the metal combined with the vivid colour of the bricks created a really strong image.   

… the only problem is after you have to take it back…

My necklace hanging in the air,  in the middle of a spiral staircase, the site specific installation diverts the necklace  former function, it is not design to be wear anymore but  it becomes an architectural element. 

I realised a "fine art necklace" for my friend Veronique, she saw my fine art costume and as a fine artist so she wanted to wear something that reflect her personality and something about herself and her background.  

To create this plastron I got inspired by palette where the painter mix his colours. I like the really dirty ones, where all the accumulation of different kind of painting create a kind of sedimentary layer and reflect as a negative version, the work in process on the canvas. 

I used some  empty some paint tubes, and empty some in my kitchen sink creating colourful pattern. 

"-flatmade:Sophie, when you finish, can I wash my vegetable in the sink?"

 I use the jig-saw in the wood workshop of the school,  (you know what you can buy me for christmas, now…my friend are already  quite scared when they see that there is already a drill next to my bed).  I used some coffee varnish to make reveal the line of the wood, make it more brown with a "vintage effect" make it battered by life. 

Eugène Leroy

Fine art is not my main interest in art, but what i like to watch when i'm going to a painting exhibition, it's the work on the materiality of painting, the superposition of layers, the movement of the brush on the canvas like the tangible trace of the painter's ardour . Sometimes i even like to watch painting from profile and see depths and reliefs, the thickness of the painting at the meeting point where painting becoming sculpture. 

With this necklace I get inspired by the painter Eugène Leroy which resorts to the impasto technique initiated by Van Gogh, using a superposition of painting layers. 

I glue them on the wood, splashing it with paint and nail polish, i also created extra fake paint with Fimo clay to give the illusion that some paint where still running out of the tube, giving a strong dynamic to the whole piece. 

Veronique: "I guess, i'm not wearing the right t-shirt today, the pattern in confusing with the necklace, tomorrow i will wear something more simple with it". 

I like the fact that the jewel becomes the master piece of the outfit and not the accessory anymore.  Because those kind of pieces is so strong, you don't match it with your clothes, but are looking for the right outfit to match with the necklace, it's the other way round, the accessorie rules the whole ensemble. 

I created this "keys jacket" for the show Danièle Imara in Jail, march 2013, a show dealing with the topic of prison based on interviews and personal experience involving videos, projections and music performance. 

from the Show, Danièle Imara in Jail

I had to design it for the warden of the prison. I get inspired by the video clip Telephone where Lady Gaga evolve in a surreal and glamourous prison environment. The idea was to make it non- realistic and really over the top in order to avoid to deal with the subject with a miserable point of view, that obviously you don't have to take at first value. Because in the collective imagery, warden alway carry theses massive key-ring, i found it interesting to move theses key on the jackets which become a fashion accessories as well as a prop. 

Having a project in mind change your way to see the world, from the moment I know i had to make this jacket, i started finding key  on the road while i was cycling (key that i wouldn't have noticed if i didn't have this design in mind).

 To collect more i went to the clobber at the corner of my street, and asked him if he had some spare keys that people don't use any more for putting on a jacket. He found my request a bit strange  (i guess not every customer ask him key for putting on theirs clothes) but, he told me, amused, that he was going to put them aside for me, and the next week he told me "this is your lucky day" giving me a massive amount of key. So now in my neigbourghood i have the reputation from the shopkeepers of being the crazy girl that collect every kind of object to make clothes! 

Then I have to stitch the key one by one on the jacket (paying attention of not mixing up my one key with the spare ones and not having to unstitch my key house from the jacket!) 

Making a lovely metallic noise, it was a great element for the performer to play with, and by the shaking of the jacket, contributed to add a rhythm to the music piece. All theses keys made the jacket really heavy but fit with the character that had to embody a kind of authority, giving another density to the body and the movement of the performer. 

You wear what you eat

food is fun

Food feed us but also our creativity, food escape from our plate and dinner table to come on our dresses and around our necks. Food is one of our main obsession, something that give us pleasure and arouse our greed. Using food in art works really well visually, bringing vivid colours and original textures, offbeat humour and lightness (but not in calories!).

A food necklace could really make you hungry, making you salivate. Although, using food in art and fashion is  not really original anymore. For me it's connoting  japanese kawaï, girly, sweet  fake junk food items that you fine in brick lane market or in china town. 

Tatty Devine playful necklaces, arouse our need of  sugar 

N2 delicacies, their chocolates and their macarons looks even more delicious than real ones! 

Edible fashion, the wearable food! 

Ice-cream high heels from Oyee Design

Food is often used in fashion as a pattern to create exotic printing like in Stella McCarney S/S 2011 collection ...

...But they remain "small player" because some designers are using REAL food in their creations. 

Hunger Pains is a photo series by artist Ted Sebarese  

I like the discrepancy between "haute couture" aesthetic and the fact of using something really trivial, mundane, down-to-earth like food to realise it. 

Dolce & Gabana dress inspired by Guiseppe Arcimboldo's paintings 

Cintia Dicker delights in a dress full of M&Ms in Ryan Yoon's shoot for Virgine Magazine - 2010

Agatha Ruiz De La Prada fashion show 

Kate Perry taste for sweet-candy theatrical dresses

Viktor & Rolf's sugar dress 

Jeremy Scott’s line of food 

Hamburger Dress by Joy Kampia

The south Korean artist Yonju Sung, makes clothes that cannot be worn and are not meant to be eaten. "I spend lots of hours at the supermarket, observing the ingredients and figuring out new ways to elaborate them. The way that certain restaurants style their food, is also an important font of inspiration.” Back at her space, half way between a kitchen, a photographer’s studio and an atelier, she documents each one of her compositions with digital images. Afterwards she dismantles the mannequin that serves as a canvas to her idiosyncratic food collages and throws everything away.

lettuce necklace

chips hearings 

eggs brooch 

eat what you wear/wear what you eat! 

"Can I have some more?" 

I used to love playing with colourful tea party set,  Some items  are so well imitated, that they look real.  They actually make you salivate till the moment you start to feel a disgusting taste of plastic in your mouth, till the moment you realise you can't actually cut this pizza into pieces, that the French fries are sticked together (never understood that), that the chicken is so bright yellow as if we was only feed with transonic hormones. And even if they look fake they is a kind of pleasure in this "fakness" The pleasure to think  that it could be real,  that you mystify yourself, and  a part of yourself still want to believe you are actually offering a real feast to your dolls and wooly toys.  

"To eat or not to eat? that is the question"

With theses necklaces i like to play with the ephemeral, using their plastic avatar to make something destined to be rotten,  perishable, more sustainable,

 No need to check the expiry date with theses jewels! 

I took this picture in Catherine in her kitchen, she is an amazing performer and with her clown  training and cabaret background she can't make spectacular grotesque priceless faces which are really easy to capture. 

Catherine is such an inspiring and inspired person  that she can grab any single object and make it part of the set creating a new narrative, association of ideas that drove us to a completely surrealistic world with its own conventions where everything make sense in a strange way, where you suspend your disbelief and accept the fact that a chicken lady cooked a reduced version of her in the oven. 

"George, what happened to you? can you hear me?" 

an anthropophage anthropomorphic lady chicken

tea time is too mainstream, I'll have chicken time

"I want to be vegan" 

"Should i eat my peers?"

Horror chicken movie

pretty ugly face

Bad taste necklace but taste good! 

"Honey?  do you want some grilled donuts? 

healthy or junk food,  what should I choose? 

Changing the function of food items=> from eating to wearing