Sacha Parent & Valentine Tiraboschi

Le Décor par le sable
The project aims to contribute to the construction of contemporary ornamentation. It questions the role of the designer in the emergence of the vocabulary that surrounds us, in order to produce appropriate, sustainable forms that draw on the heritage of the history of art and technology.
Valentine Tiraboschi and Sacha Parent combine the skills of staff, porcelain and foundry with a process of generating shapes by pouring sand. They develop an applied ornamental grammar. Linking designers and natural phenomena, they create a co-production protocol.
By moulding, these sand ornaments are transposed into objects in noble materials linked to our interiors: candlesticks, dishes, mirrors or even capitals. For the designers, the postindustrial ornament is generated by the way it is designed: it finds its function on the very scale of the material. The decorative qualities of sand flows become structural qualities that put nature back at the centre of the production of the artefacts that surround us.
The sand ornaments form a vital and ephemeral device. They challenge us, as creators or users, to question the uniformity of formal vocabularies and the standardisation of contemporary production methods. These patent decors are an ode to nature, freely interpreted: “Let Nature be your only goddess. Have absolute faith in her. Be certain that she is never ugly and limit your ambition to being faithful to her.”(Testament of Auguste Rodin, 1917.)