Elissa Lacoste is a French artist and designer. She graduated from the School of Art and Design of Saint Etienne (FR) and with a Masters at Design Academy Eindhoven (NL).
Elissa lives and works between Burgundy in France and Montréal in Canada. Hands-on and instinctive, her work ensues from her quest for the wild, the inexplicable, and the sensorial in the contemporary. Questioning and bending the boundaries of the normative, Elissa Lacoste explores otherness in her sculptural design. Her pieces are inspired by Paleolithic materiality, where the natural environment was the primary inspiration for the artistic creation of early homo sapiens.
Through the use of synthetic materials, she engages with the impact of the Anthropocene on our environment and explores the tension between the natural and the artificial. Lacoste’s tactile silicone pieces seek the grotesque in an attempt to embrace and celebrate differences. Lithic Desk, Seat and Side-table, 2020 The Lithic desk, seat, and side-table are part of a collection I dream of megalithic times, initiated during a residency at Alfa. I dream of megalithic times embarks us into an interior environment composed of various speleothem-like shapes erected into silicone skins with earthly pigments kneaded into them.
Evocative fleshy consistency, indefinable colors, and gnarly textures devise an alternative realm that provokes cognitive dissonance. Her work brings a realm where the presumed functions of the pieces seem to be undomesticated, morphing different affordances into one element. Alien earthlings form an inverted troglodyte interior relating to a primal identity of the visitor, who curiously and sensuously uncovers the whimsical environment.
Like karst topography adorned with horizontal lines of frothy puddles and bolt upright rubbery stone formations, this series relates to the natural on myriad scales, from mold growth to canyons. I dream of megalithic times invites the viewer to ponder the borderlands between inside and outside, between their preconceived ideas of materiality and their imagination. The oxidized copper surfaces of the Lithic Desk, add a mat opaque surface that contrasts with the smooth, translucent silicone, unsettling perception and adding another dimension.
