Agathe Bouvachon
Images courtesy Agathe Bouvachon© | Img. 1 Beurres | Img. 2 Beurres, packaging | Img. 4 Cake: Total Du 37 € | Img. 5 Je te Quitte | Img. 6 You are fired | Img. 7 Let us be friends
Agathe Bouvachon is a young freelance designer from Paris, she works on product design to graphics and again to food design, base her concept about relationship between the objects, their image and their taste..
Fascinated by the universe of food, she has developed several projects in which the kitchen and graphics blur into one another.
Looking to the website, I suggest you take her Beurres projects, made for the Marc Bretillot’s design studio ESAD in Reims, the well known culinary atelier.
Here the butter, essential food for every French dining, rebels itself to his shapeless destiny of simply fat matter and taking the design of precious gems: as a Breton’s ancient traditions sculptural votive, such as geometric minerals, but softened with scents and unexpected colors.
Her small nuggets were created in 4 versions, depending on the dish you eat with:
Butter shallots, mustard and basil – for meat
Butter red berries, cinnamon and orange juice – for desserts
Butter with red berries, basil and cheese – for vegetables
Butter, pepper, chives and lemon – for fish
Agathe, where did you get the idea of working on the butter and turn it into “precious” gems?
I decided to focus on the butter is because it is a food that I love most, especially for its wealth. It can be flavored in endless ways, and it can then be used for the preparation of dishes and spread on sandwiches. I started to inform about the butter and I studied the rituals about it on traditional Brittany festivals: the sculptures of Breton butter offered as a gift to the gods.
In India and Tibet there are wonderful sculptures of butter colored with natural pigments.
I have also been interested in the gestures associated with butter: my idea of the stones of butter was actually born from the act of cut it with knives, trying each time to cut into thin slices. So that’s how my gems were born …
How did you create the link between the various flavors of 4 versions?
The combination of flavors comes from the study of Cuisine Francaise. What I’ve found interesting was the fact that the butter is also used in savory dishes and also in those sweet, so I decided to develop a variation of 4 tastes, categorized according to which accompany the dish: meat, fish, vegetables and desserts.
For each bud I’ve made a lot of tests and then chose the ones that looked interesting for the visual effect by the set of colors and from the different tastes.
What links the graphics and the food in your opinion?
I think I’m totally enraptured by the beauty of food. Each has its own way of perceiving it, there are so many people on earth as many flavors of butter. Eachone has his own personal culinary ghosts and traveling, I realized that it is always one of the first topics of conversation and it is something to be shared during social meetings.
Moreover, as a graphic designer, I’m always been interested in images, always looking for new media experiences. The food, which sometimes I used as a support (such as my Cakes) or to carve a new unexpected form, is a wonderful medium to communicate and conveys to a huge audience. The food draws the imagination of all of us, arouses strong feelings such as taste and disgust. Here is the graphic designer, with a wise use of communication tools, can play with the image of the food and bring the audience to imagine a food in a completely new way.
Malheureusement to buy Beurres of Agathe to wait until 2012. For now we can follow his culinary projects in collaboration with Magali Wehrung on their blog.
