BOISBUCHET RESIDENCY PROGRAMME
MICHELA D’ANGELO
SEASON 2022
Michela D’Angelo is a designer and illustrator based in Eindhoven. She was born in 1991 in Rome (Italy), graduated in Product Design at the College of Art and Design of Valencia in Spain (EASD) in 2015, and later in 2016 she held a master in Illustration at ESAT (Valencia).
Through several collaborations she was able to observe crafts artists more closely, one of them being the ceramist Juan Carlos Iniesta from Domanises, who introduced her to ceramics. She participated in multiple editions of the Boisbuchet workshops with Jaime Hayon, the Corning Museum of Glass and Hadrien Venat. Getting in touch with contemporary ceramic techniques, turning, hand-moulding, using a wood-burning kiln, 3d printed ceramics, and glass blowing. In 2017 she moved in Eindhoven (the Netherlands) to join the Spanish artist Nacho Carbonell. Participating in prototyping, designing and developing the pieces, she learned from Nacho the importance of the errors, the singularities within imperfections, translated into a very instinctive and visceral style based on feelings.
In 2021 Michela created her own atelier, MiDA-lab, where she began her own ceramic production with the “Bodies Jungle” collection exhibited during 2021 Dutch Design Week. The collection is described as “hybrid shapes, incredible living organisms, suspended between a plant-animal world and the human one. Through a gradual contamination between forms, new bodies develop themselves, evolving into a new evolutionary stage.” The pieces give back a very organic feeling, giving the impression of a desire for movement, a desire to breath, to be alive.
As human beings we are accustomed to the idea that we are the only or the main holders of a culture, that we are the only ones who have literature, are able to produce art, have feelings and deserve rights.
Well, what if we revise this assumption? What if plants, animals, mountains, rivers, rooks and objects too had their own way of expressing themselves that escapes our limited perceptions?
Inspired by academic botanist Stefano Mancuso’s “La nazione delle piante”, Michela’s anthropocentric view creating shapes that are suspended between human, plant, animal and material world.
“These beings are very different, yet the same, very capable of interacting with one another and very much deprived of boundaries. Each piece has its own identity, its own character and expresses it through pose and movement. There are those who are more bold, those who are more shy, cheerful, sad, undecided, confident. All these traits that we human beings appropriate, actually belong to all things.”
Michela’s work, among many other things, has revolved around the idea that we are shaped by the objects around us just as much as we shape them. As someone who has lived at least six years in three different countries it feels natural to assume that her roots have the ability to float and find life and nutrients in many different soils, adapting to different environments, just like most plants would.
Raices Flotantes is a hybrid project that embraces Michela’s desire to mix and connect different materials in one organic shape. Is the result of experiments that took place during a residency in Domaine de Boisbuchet (FR), where she learnt the rattan technique and combined it with modular ceramic pieces previously extruded and fired.
A bit more about the process: Tentacular forms are created by connecting modular fragments. Once the pieces are completed they are digitalised by 3d scanning through photogrammetry, in order to keep as much information as possible over the texture, and finally polished. Once digitalised these objects can live their virtual life and can even be animated: our first project idea was to create movement interaction between the digitalised shapes and a viewer.In a world that is moving towards a digital and virtual existence, we feel that the least we can do is to try to preserve as much possible analogue techniques, instead of replacing everything with cold perfect algorithms, carrying them with us into this journey towards innovation.
