The French designer Guillaume Bardet drew an object a day over a one-year period, from September 21st, 2009 to September 21st, 2010. In the autumn of 2010, he began producing each of them in collaboration with fourteen ceramists from the Pays de Dieulefit region in Southeastern France. The exhibition of the resulting objects, L’usage Des Jours: 365 Ceramic Objects, ended its exhibition course at mudac, Lausanne (March 27 – May 26, 2013) with a striking installation by designer Vincent Dupont-Ringier.
The exhibition features porcelain, earthenware, and stoneware fashioned with a wide variety of techniques. (Watch the video below to get a sense of the tremendous array of forms that Bardet invented and a glimpse at some of the production process that were used.) Dupont-Ringier’s exhibition design gives each of the 365 objects their due: whether they are utilitarian or sculptural, large or small, brightly colored or muted. The pieces were grouped and shown by season and each of the 365 pieces were made to order in a numbered edition of six. L’usage des jours (or The Use of Days) represents the extraordinary challenge of rendering one’s ever-changing mental landscape and the progression of Bardet’s objects documents the breakthroughs, occasional doubts, and endless research that is the creative process.
If you missed the show, you can experience it virtually (see the link below) at Bardet’s site that is dedicated to the project. As in the physical exhibition, the work is presented chronologically and each individual object is labeled with the day on which it was conceived.
In 2011, Guillaume Bardet and his ceramist collaborators were awarded the prestigious Liliane Bettencourt Prize for the Intelligence of the Hand. “We went through quite a journey, we pulled together and we all supported each other,” Guillaume Bardet said of the project. “What initially started with one man has become, over the months, a real human adventure.”
Guillaume Bardet is a French designer who is based in Paris. He was educated at L’ Ecole des Arts Decoratifs, Paris and is a laureate of the prestigious Villa Medici, Roma, where he was invited for a one-year residency in 2003. He taught at Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Création Industrielle de Paris until 2009. He worked at the Jean Marie Massaud Architectural practice in Paris between 1999 and 2002, after which he began his own design practice, creating furniture and objects for Ligne Roset, Liv’it, De Vecchi, Triode, and Aquamass and collaborating with Louis Vuitton and Vivendi Environment.
Amy Albracht is the General Editor at CFile.
Above image: Ceramic lamp from Guillaume Bardet’s exhibition L’usage Des Jours: 365 Ceramic Objects at mudac (2013) in Lausanne, France. Photograph courtesy of Guillaume Bardet and mudac.
Guillaume Bardet’s exhibition L’usage des jours at mudac (2013) in Lausanne, France. Photography courtesy of Guillaume Bardet and mudac.
Design à Dieulefit, 2012, by L-Films. An interview with Guillaume Bardet amid the installation of his exhibition, L’usage Des Jours: 365 Ceramic Objects at mudac. In French.
Visit Guillaume Bardet’s website for L’usage des jours: 365 ceramic objects
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