Lorraine Legrand on clay, bread and making materials sing

“The image of the helmet appeared to me spontaneously. This time the bread is no longer a weapon but a derisory protection. It is a metaphor for the illusion of a sense of control and therefore of security. “

Screenshot from Sympathy by Lorraine Legrand

In a mini series of short interviews, Maren Bang of the Elementa crew presents the work of some of her fellow master graduates from Design Academy Eindhoven the spring of 2021.

The French ceramic artist Lorraine Legrand has spent the last years venturing deeply into the formal and artistic possibilities of clay. In her BREAD project, she takes on the adjacent art of making bread with the eye and hand of a ceramicist. For Lorraine breadmaking becomes a reflection about the basic sanity inherent in our most ancient crafts, and a search for an antidote to the neurotic relationship most of us have to modern food industry.

# Maren: What is your background? How did you end up working with clay?

Lorraine: I grew up in the Paris suburbs. I started working with clay in my first year of Fine Arts. In the beginning, I was not shaping but simply dripping fabric in liquid clay and firing it. It was so thin that only a few of the shapes were coming out of the kiln complete. The others were dismantling as they were so thin. I was seduced by the extreme fragility of the material. For the next assignment, I used clay again without asking myself too many questions. Each new project was an occasion for the material to reveal a new facet of its personality and its infinite potential. It became my main mean of expression.

“Bread has nothing to hide, as its composition is simple. Somehow it’s also full of secrets, as there are so many variations. There, I crushed my seeds to make flour and I made my bread. I left the role of the passive and sick consumer to become an active and independent producer. I made bread my weapon.”

Screenshot from Sympathy by Lorraine Legrand

# Maren: How did you end up in Eindhoven, at a department for Contextual Design? A Fine Arts degree but still a Master related to design?

My ex-boyfriend was in love with Design Academy Eindhoven and brought me once to DDW (Dutch Design Week). I became attracted by the energy of it, and I took the decision to apply spontaneously. I got accepted, and once I was admitted, I had to take the opportunity to experience it all. After three years in Fine Art, I was also a bit fed up, and I thought that more rational thinking of the design field could be interesting for me as my practice is based on my imagination and fantasies. I the end, I developed even more my confidence in my world rather than learning to rationalize it.

“To want to go beyond the need to feed yourself is to want to free yourself from your human condition. Because the vulnerability is unbearable. A challenge to your own nature that is doomed to failure, because the only answer to vulnerability is compassion.”

Screenshot from Sympathy by Lorraine Legrand

# Maren: You just finished a residency at The European Ceramic Workcentre, how was it?

The residency was a great experience. It was an environment that suits me perfectly. In academies, fine art as much as design academy it’s mostly a matter of words. Students sometimes take four meetings a day to explain four times the same project to 4 different persons. They want to hold the entire project mentally even before starting to do it because they want to make sure they will be able to answers the tutor’s questions during the exam. I struggle to find sense in this. I think it’s a very limited approach that puts the intellectual side in the center of the process, but work and creating is not only about this.

At EKWC, the material and the process were the core of attention. More things were happening; fewer words were consumed. Besides that it was also probably the best working conditions you can dream of when you like claying.

# Maren: Can you tell me a bit about your bread-project?

The project was about making bread while telling stories that have something to do with «being enclosed in» (it was during the lock-down), and I ended up making helmets out of bread. The bread was not edible; I was rather focused on the expressive potential of the ingredients I was shaping the bread while also for example opening a pomegranate that reminds of blood and vivid organs as I was speaking about extraction of the organs during embalming. I played with the connections between what was said and what we could see in the images on video.

“In this context, to decide to make my bread is to decide to start all over again from the beginning, from the base. And the basis of our diet (at least in the Mediterranean and Mesopotamian basin) for millennia has been bread. It is such a simple and beautiful alchemy that happens when we mix flour with water to make a dough that we then bake.”

#Maren: How did you experience working with a static, finalized “material” as film in contrast to your very tactile and organic craft? Or would you perhaps describe it in another manner?

I used film making because the work is really centred on the material and what we can sense from it. Since I did that project during the lock-down, it was not possible to share this physical power of the material other than using videos. video is a really good way to « make the material sing,» if that makes sense …

On many aspects, bread is similar to clay; it’s one of the first things human beings crafted on earth. Bread can take many shapes, depending on how it’s fired with what flour we make it with how it is cooked. In terms of sculpture, it’s an interesting material. The crust, the cracks, the colours, and the shapes of bread are also simply beautiful, I think. And bread is closely related to togetherness; we share bread during meals.

# Maren: How do you think that you will work once you leave the academy?

My own approach is closed to crafts. I believe that the practice and the relationship built with the material bring value and strength to the work, and I believe that being able to master something and make good work takes time. The difference is that I develop crafts that can express a kind of idea of beauty that I have rather than mastering techniques that enable me to make functional objects. Lastly, I will say that the most important thing to me is beauty rather than function, knowing that beauty has nothing to do with aesthetics. How do I define beauty is another question that I think my shapes answer better than my words.

«Stones Also Need to Rest» is Lorraine Legrand’s graduation project from Design Academy Eindhoven, and will be exhibited at Dutch Designweek in October 2021.

“Sympathy”, one of several short films by Lorraine Legrand from her Bread project at Design Academy Eindhoven 2020/2021.