Set against daylight, a panel of Loumi Le Floc’h’s material reads like stained glass: bands of amber, moss, and deep blue, each seam catching light differently than the last. Only up close does the material reveal itself as something else entirely — strips of dried eggplant skin, dyed and pieced together into a surface she calls Precious Peels. What looks like an ancient craft of glass and lead came is, in fact, kitchen waste, reworked into something the artist’s own materials describe as organic stained glass.
The transformation happens through a controlled chemical process the artist has spent years refining: aubergine skins, discarded whole from food production, are treated until their natural pigments shift into a much wider range than their source color would suggest — bright reds, velvety browns, deep blues — each strip translucent enough to pass light through, flexible enough to bend like fabric, but stable enough to hold a fixed pattern once assembled. Le Floc’h builds her larger panels the way a glazier would, arranging hundreds of individually toned pieces into a single radiating or wave-like composition before they’re set.
That structural stability is what lets the material leave the studio table for architecture: sandwiched between two panes of glass, it becomes a one-of-a-kind window or door; unsandwiched, it can cover a wall, wrap a lighting fixture, or become a custom object in its own right. Precious Peels has shown at Paris Design Week and Maison & Objet Paris, and at Collectible in Brussels, and is introduced through ADÈLE Collections in Paris.
Le Floc’h, who grew up in southwest France and trained at La Cambre in Brussels and the Weissensee Kunsthochschule in Berlin, now develops the work at Ateliers Zaventem near Brussels, a shared studio space built around exactly this kind of material research. Precious Peels, along with the rest of Loumi Le Floc’h’s work, is on display on her artist profile on Art Fair.
