LAUSANNE, SWITZERLAND / ATHENS, GREECE

WOOD: CHERRY

Isabelle Baudraz is a Swiss designer currently working between Lausanne and Athens. Baudraz trained as a jeweller before enrolling at ECAL to study industrial design. In 2016, she received the Prix d’Encouragement de la ville de Renens and with it gained the chance to create her first exhibition. Her ECAL project, a bench she designed for the Musée National Picasso-Paris in 2018, was also part of the Diego Giacometti exhibition there.

The brief from AHEC arrived at the beginning of the country’s second lockdown and was warmly welcomed by Baudraz. ‘I thought that I could finally do something positive with this situation. That it would allow me to process it in some way.’ She came up with four different pieces linked by the same underlying sentiment. ‘The whole concept is to bring “presences” and companionship to people locked inside alone. And so some of them are more contemplative while others are more tactile,’ she says.