Between digital manipulation, 3D printing and constantly transforming forms, the French designer explores the unstable boundary between what we see on a screen and what we can touch. At first glance, the creations of Audrey Large seem to belong to a parallel reality. Forms deform, surfaces appear liquid and contours seem to escape matter, as if a digital image had suddenly been captured and turned into an object. And yet, behind these almost unreal presences lies a concrete process, in which technology and human gesture meet to challenge the way we perceive things.
Born in Toulouse in 1994 and now based in the Netherlands, Audrey Large graduated in 2017 in Social Design from the Design Academy Eindhoven, where she developed the foundations of her research. Her graduation project, Life.VFX, represents a fundamental starting point: through three-dimensional scans and motion capture, the designer manipulated images of everyday objects, turning them into altered models that were then 3D printed. A pitcher, for example, lost its recognizable shape through a succession of deformations, giving rise to something both familiar and alien. In 2019 she continued her research as a designer in residence at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht.
In Large’s work, technology is not used to faithfully reproduce reality, but to transform it. Drawing, three-dimensional modeling, image manipulation and digital fabrication intertwine without necessarily following a set order. The result is objects that seem suspended between sculpture and simulation, capable of blurring the distinction between a computer-generated image and a physical form.
The Implicit Surfaces series and her Metaobjects develop this intuition further. Fluid surfaces, irregular geometries and chromatic illusions give life to presences that are hard to classify, in which the traditional function of the object gives way to perception. It is not simply a matter of making design more futuristic: Large invites us to look longer, to doubt what is in front of us and to accept that a form may not reveal itself completely.
This research earned her the Dutch Design Award in the Young Designer category in 2021 and the Emerging Designer recognition at the Dezeen Awards in 2023. Her works have also been presented in international contexts, including the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein. The most interesting part of her practice is perhaps the way it escapes the idea that technology must produce perfect and predictable results. Despite the use of advanced digital tools, Large seeks unstable forms, imperfections and transformations that give objects an almost organic quality. The machine thus becomes a tool to be guided and put to the test, not a system to be followed passively.
In the project Hot Dipped: The Frog and the Sacrificial Skin, presented in 2025, this research also extends to industrial processes and the chemical transformations of matter. Through metal 3D printing and hot-dip galvanizing, Large investigates the relationship between technology, protection and change, taking her experimentation beyond the synthetic surfaces that characterize many of her earlier works.
Her design, ultimately, does not seek to make the future more understandable, but to leave open the possibilities it contains. In a world where digital images are increasingly present in everyday life, Audrey Large reminds us that even what seems immaterial has a consistency, and that looking at an object means engaging not only with its form, but with the expectations we project onto it.
