Jolie Laide
AGP403
From: First year studies at Brighton University
‘Jolie Laide’ was my first self directed project that I produced at university. I had to search for my topic of interest and build a project based on a self-written brief. Which read: ‘Using the topic ‘Jolie Laide’, a contradictive French phrase meaning ‘ugly beautiful’, you must create a body of work perpetuating your understanding and interpretation of the topic. Invert the power of aesthetic design, use unconventional colours, materials and process’ to create disfigured objects that we use everyday, often seen as beautiful in design and purpose. Both looks and function should be influenced by the topic. Don’t be afraid to follow a path that could be a dead end, be experimental.’
For the first part of this project I made multiple inspiration boards of colours, shapes and images of stereotypical ‘ugly’ and beautiful items we interact with every day. This led me to grow my own bacteria. I swabbed a plethora of different items in my house such as toilet, mouldy fruit, a keyboard and unclean plates. Once grown, I wanted to exaggerate the natural beauty of the shapes and colours formed from the clusters of germs, I used different materials to achieve this such as coloured cotton balls, beads and pipe cleaners.
I was inspired by the work of Klari Reis and their petri dish installations where they use bright coloured materials and liquids to imitate bacteria. I started to create my own collection of ‘beautiful’ abstract bacteria. At this point I had come to the conclusion that I wanted to create a piece of furniture, a sofa. I planned to use the bacteria inspired art to inform the design of the sofa. The form of the sofa would be based on the ‘ugly’ bacteria and the function would soft, comfortable and ‘beautiful’. - ‘jolie laide’
The image above was my final design for the sofa. Once I knew what I wanted the form of the sofa to be I started focusing on the colours and shape. I did this by drawing out some variations which led me to finally decide on a green colour scheme to reflect the stereotypical ugliness we see and associate with bacteria in everyday life. I also chose for the shape to be a circle as not many modern sofas are cylindrical.
My next step was to plan the build and the technical side of the sofa. The sofa was built with two large circular boards, one laid on the floor which was attached to poles that would hold up the top board, I then had to cushion the top part using long pillows, made by myself. The diameter of the sofa was just shy of two meters.
The pillows were the most time consuming element of the project as I had to cut, sew and stuff around 30 different cylindrical pillows. It was also very challenging to get the fluff evenly through the pillow, I couldn’t just shove it down! I used three different coloured materials two corduroy and one cotton, the pillows also all varied in size. Next I made the structure of the sofa. Once constructed I added all the pillows and stitched them into the top of the sofa to secure them.
Final Outcome :
