Audrey Large sculpts ordinary materials into extraordinary forms

"I like fluid materials that play with light, whether they reflect or absorb it, textures that cannot really be described or grasped, and combining contradictory materials with impossible shapes," says Audrey Large, a French designer based in the Netherlands.

Audrey's portfolio spans a medley of lamps, appearing like liquid obsidian with the way they've oozed like lava and formed into crystallised objects. You'll also find sculptural pieces that are so smooth and amorphous; models of characters that can fit in your palm; and artworks fusing together in an unexpected mix of textures and patterns on gallery floors and walls.

She's made large-scale sculptures for Nxt museum in Amsterdam (that's three metres high!), a chess set with designer Theophile Blandet, a light series called Quark, and stamps made with Koos Breen for Post NL. At first glance, you might think these pieces are all digitally rendered, but their painterly shapes and luminous hues are in fact physical objects, composed through a salad of tools and software.

Audrey grew up south of Toulouse and completed a BA in Product Design at ESAD in Reims, before moving to the Netherlands to pursue an MA at the Design Academy in Eindhoven. Here, she honed her craft, learning the fundamentals and developing the skills needed to launch her own independent practice.

"The Dutch school allowed me to broaden my vision of design and find my own voice," she says. "I began to adopt a more experimental approach to objects which, thanks to the combination of digital tools and digital manufacturing, quickly took on a more sculptural form." This process led to her interest in designing across a range of mediums, including works for galleries and museums, as well as digital art, graphic design, and sculpture.

Whichever medium Audrey puts her talented mind to, rest assured, it will be conceived in her signature fluid style and will often be hard to pin down with a definition. "Much of my work focuses on gestures, movements, drawings and on finding the precise moment when ambiguity of the material becomes apparent," she explains, citing images, cinema and painting as a key inspiration.

When she's not drawing from these visual references, she works intuitively with her hands, building tactile sculptures riddled with emotion. "It's very much about setting an intention in a direction or a perceptual effect, then investing in a state of intuition to search through gesture, practice and interaction until I almost get there."

After the idea is set, she will then get her head stuck into research, which involves hand drawing on paper and 3D modelling on a computer. This tends to involve 3D modelling in sculpting mode or sculpting directly in virtual reality. Another route involves materials research and experimentation to bring the 3D files produced on the computer into the real world, highlighting the surface effects they create.

Audrey says, "Preparing files for machines, 3D printing, post-processing, mould making, casting, assembly, packing – all of these processes are not clearly separated, and I would say that I spend a lot of time training myself to 'look'. The pieces take shape in the workshop next to me throughout the design process, which I adjust and extend in parallel with the materialisation."

Moving beyond the physical world, Audrey has also stepped into the new territory of virtual reality sculpting. Using Binder Jetting in sand, a 3D printing technology, enables her to create complex designs with plenty of freedom.

She's also begun researching women's knowledge of health and earth-related practices in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, a topic she finds fascinating. "There is so much to learn from these oral traditions, most of which have been preserved in writing only through summaries of witchcraft trials." From this, she's started exploring moulding techniques and pigmented plaster drawing, a "very pictorial process" that involves painting directly onto 3D-printed models with the material. "I can feel the huge space for content and material research."

We're also excited to say that she's preparing for a solo exhibition at the Van Oosteroom Gallery in Rotterdam, which will showcase a new series of virtual reality sculptures and sand 3D-printed pieces titled Flowstones, plus a new installation of "women's forgotten knowledge" for the Noüs festival with BNF archives in Paris.