AfterImages Vases - Green vase "cupboard"

name designer: Mathilde Garcia 

Bio of the designer: 

Mathilde Garcia is a designer and artist-author, who graduated from the École Supérieure d’Art et Design de Saint-Étienne in 2022. She lives and works in Saint-Étienne, where she develops her practice in the city’s former Beaux-Arts building. Her work explores familiar objects and functional forms, transforming them to shift their use and bring their decorative dimension to the fore. Vases, suitcases, boxes and mirrors become supports for forms, images and narratives. She works primarily with wood, MDF, 3D printing and metal, combining craft techniques with contemporary processes. Her research focuses on the place of ornament and decoration in contemporary design, the surface as a narrative space, and signs drawn from everyday visual culture. In 2025, she co-founded the collective ppdesigner, dedicated to developing new spaces for exhibiting and bringing together artists and designers. Her work has notably been presented during Paris Design Week and at Villa Noailles.

title: AfterImages Vases - Green vase "cupboard"

short description: 

Vases: Afterimages is a series of vases exploring the relationship between function, decoration, and narrative surface. Presented as part of the exhibition The Ashtray, the Cupboard and the Leather Boots, Vase Vert is built around an internal structure that defines the volume required for its use as a container. Around this structure, wooden façades are assembled, drawn and developed almost like two-dimensional forms. Set a few centimetres away from the container, they appear to float around it, creating a second, freer volume that is released from the constraints of function.

These façades become narrative surfaces. They are ornamented with signs drawn from contemporary visual culture, particularly emojis, which compose narratives connected to memories, places, collective imaginaries, or the contexts in which the objects are presented.

The series is based on a dialogue between traditional techniques and contemporary tools. The internal structure is made of MDF and conceived as a container, while the façades are cut from slabs of old oak from the Caserne de Sully in Saint-Cloud. Cut by laser, they are then decorated with 3D-printed elements, inlaid into the wood following the principle of intarsia. Screws, nuts, and rivets make the technical and industrial assembly visible.

Afterimages proposes a shift in the usual relationship between function and decoration. The vase retains a structure that refers to its primary function, while its external form breaks free from it to become a narrative surface. Decoration is therefore no longer simply applied to a finished object; it contributes to the construction of a new volume. This approach considers ornament as an active component of the object and as a way of producing narratives from familiar forms.

shorter : 

Vases: Afterimages explores the relationship between function, decoration, and narrative surface. Vase Vert combines an internal structure defining the volume of the container with wooden façades, drawn as almost two-dimensional forms. Set apart from the structure, they appear to float around it, creating a second, freer volume that is released from the constraints of function.

The façades become narrative surfaces, ornamented with signs drawn from contemporary visual culture, particularly emojis. They are made from old oak, laser-cut and then inlaid with 3D-printed elements following the principle of intarsia.

The series brings traditional craft techniques into dialogue with contemporary tools, while shifting the relationship between function and decoration: ornament is no longer simply applied to the object, but directly contributes to the construction of its volume and narrative.

materials used: Stained oak, stainless steel, MDF, 3D printing

selling price : 850 €

For sale / Unique piece 

Made to order that can be produced in different variations (colour, ornament adapted, materials too.)