Dried & Soft: Laureline Galliot

What happens when an iPad becomes the primary tool of the design process? The surprisingly shaped and brightly colored works of Laureline Galliot, a Paris based designer and digital artist, provide one answer to this question.

Thick lines of color with slight shakes in their trajectory reveal her technique of “painting” on an iPad, bringing the hand a machine together to create a ditinctive and contemporary design style. Galliot explores the new possibilities that are opened by harnessing digital tools such as the aforementioned iPad as well as techniques such as 3D animation and 3D printing. In doing so, she questions the methods of industrial design practice and offers a fun and bold reimagining of what design in the 21st century can be.

As part of Paris Design Week, the textile company Balsan invited Galliot to produce a new range of pieces. The resulting exhibition, Dried and Soft, shows Galliot’s exploration into archetypal plant patterns and reflection on the colors of autumn.

TLmag speaks to Laureline Galliot about her practice and Dried and Soft:

TLmag: Your works mix digital and traditional making techniques, how do you approach these objects that sit between hand-crafted and digital production?
Laureline Galliot: Traditional hand painted tableware and also industrial products are generally made in precise order, first, the object is sculpted or molded, then it is painted or printed.

I reject this practice which leaves color to the final stages of the design process, I seek to work with color as a medium. I think the gesture of decorating the object can be the same gesture that sculpts the shape itself.

Therefore, my works reflect my exploration in merging color with structure, integrating it into the design instead of layering it over the top at the end. This is possible thanks to a combination of virtual modeling and full color 3D printers which can give birth to a new kind of digitally hand-painted ceramics, for instance.

You have traveled extensively pursuing your design practice, have you found the design cultures of different countries very different from each other?
I have traveled from France to London, Japan, Taïwan, Peru, Bolivia, Pennsylvania, California, Italy, Danemark, Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Austria, Netherlands, Belgium, Germany.

Hopefully, there are many differences to discover in many aspects of these places, not only design! But surprisingly what I look for is not only differences but also common points to see how bridges can be built between cultures to make new things, to write new chapters. Crossing cultures is both noticing the differences and the similarities.

What will visitors discover at Dried & Soft?
This exhibition is a collaboration with Balsan, a French company that specializes in printed floor coverings. For this special show, we worked together on a new series of printed patterns: ONIYO, PULUMO and FOYUDORO. These patterns will stand as a background for a complete set display featuring the colorful 3D printed series of tableware I designed. Altogether, it shapes an installation where 2D patterns merge with 3D objects as I consider any surfaces as a canvas to be painted.

Can you explain the name of the exhibition?
Dried for dried leaves, Soft for tufty floor coverings.

At first, I wanted to challenge myself to deal with a very common topic within pattern design history: designing plant patterns to be printed. As I work from living models, I went out to find real plants. But in daily life, as a citizen living in a big city, the first plants we meet are dried leaves on the ground, arranged in an elegant chaos thanks to the wind from car traffic. We meet vegetables in plastic bags in supermarkets. We meet dried unidentified leaves gathered into nets to be thrown away by city hall employees. But finding a real tree is quite rare. I wanted to make poetry out of this.

Dried and Soft will be on display until September 15 at Balsan Paris