Incollect Magazine - Issue 12

Incollect Magazine 85 The movement of my wrist, as if it were that of my whole body, leads me on and into a four-dimensional space.” Everything is made in Moreau’s studio in Épernon, a small rural town in the Val-de-Loire. Sketches and drawings are hung on the walls and piled on tables, more as the residue of an initial inspiration than a fixed idea or a guide. Sometimes she shapes clay models, but they serve simply as reference points. She works mostly in solitude, often on multiple pieces concurrently. Her oeuvre includes furniture and lighting that is both functional and sculptural, and wall sculptures and drawings. Moreau has enjoyed success following her collaboration with Vignault, who has sold her works both through his gallery and Incollect to prominent interior designers including Jake Arnold, Julie Hillman, Jacques Grange, and Serge Castella. Her works are included in the collections of the Musée Cernuschi in Paris and the Posco Art Museum in Seoul. Moreau was born in Seoul in 1967 and graduated from Seoul National University’s Department of Fine Arts in 1991 with a specialization in sculpture. In 1996, Moreau enrolled in a master’s program at the École Camondo, a school for architecture and interior design in Paris. She embarked on a career in interior design and for the next two decades worked as a project team leader on architectural and interior design schemes for art museums, palaces, hotels, and private residences. But she never gave up her dream of dedicating herself to artistic furniture design. “She sketched in her notebooks what would later come to life through her skilled hands as sculptures and works of art,” Vignault says. Her earliest furniture sculptures include the Enchantée tables featured in the AD cover story, were initially carved out of oak wood and later cast in bronze, with natural colors and finishes ranging from gold to black. The design is organic, with a mushroom-like shape with a single or double stem, and a sinuous crack at one edge of the polished top to simulate split wood. “You enter my world as if into a forest or an enchanted tale,” she says about her aesthetic inspiration. “The organic forms I compose and recompose are carved and dictated by the magic of nature.” Perhaps her most spectacular series to date is the La Griffe Du Temps collection. There are three pieces in this collection: a console/cabinet, a tall cabinet and a tall chest with five drawers arranged on three sides, all handcrafted in a material palette of solid oak and bronze. The interiors are made of a rare black oak from the Marais, “a wood that has been submerged for thousands of years in peat bogs, giving an intense and unique black color,” the artist explains. The exterior wood is textured as if combed, and tinted with Chinese ink to give the grooves a sense of Roche en Équilibre (Rock in Balance), 2017. Coffee table in sculpted solid oak. Top tinted with Chinese ink, two sculpted hollows gilded with gold dust. Base sculpted and tinted in nuances from black to natural oak. Signed and numbered.