Cedric Laquieze is an Amsterdam-based artist who creates eerie and incredible sculptures! I first came across his floral skeletons, which sit right on the intersection of terribly creepy and deeply beautiful (my favorite place). He also creates intricate fairies and organs and all sorts of really fascinating sculptural pieces. I had the great pleasure of interviewing him for our Artist Spotlight series.

The first work of yours I encountered were your floral skeletons, memento mori is something I explore a lot with my own design work so they instantly resonated with me. Despite their morbid themes they have a real ecstatic joy about them, the riot of color against a bony decayed shape. How did you develop the idea behind them? What was your first one?

The first series of the flower skeletons was actually a part of my graduation show for the Rietveld academy, we had been studying Midsummer nights dream from Shakespeare and one of my teachers challenged me to make a sculpture of puck who is a trickster, so i decided to use a human skeleton (plastic) and put him in an unusual animalistic position and cover the rest in flowers.

I was imagining a creature that looks outlandish both terrifying and beautiful and could camouflage itself in a fairy tale landscape.

I liked the result so much that I kept on going.

What is the process behind creating one of your floral skeletons? Are the flowers real!?

The flowers are silk replicas that i take apart and recompose for the simple reason that real flowers perish too quickly.

The ideas usually starts with which animal i would like to work on and then comes the position and finally what kind of pattern it should have.

Your floral fairies are also really beautiful and eerily real seeming. I love that each one is entirely one of a kind. On your site you mentioned uniting folks with their own fairy, how do you connect a person to your work that way?  Do you create each one with a person in mind or see which they are drawn to?

Well the aspect of the fairies that i like the most is that over the span almost 20 years and hundreds of fairies, I’ve never made the same piece twice and the shapes colors and designs are extremely diverse from dark and intimidating to almost cartoon like or Victorian and classic each one has found its counterpart.

I always encourage people to name their fairy when they acquire it .

Under the dome the fairies are about 35 cm high and tend to get bigger and more complex over the years.

And when it comes to commissioned pieces i usually ask which previous work has caught the eye of the interested party and make something new using those textures and colors.

 

How did you find your voice creatively? Do you work in mediums beyond sculpture/installation art? What is it about 3D work that inspires you?

I’ve always been tinkering around drawing and making things, it started seriously when I was about 13 and an aunt gave me a big amount of clay and I proceeded to make toys and creatures from that point on…

I play around sometimes with wearable pieces and I like the idea of making jewelry and I’m ALWAYS looking for new materials to play around with.

What I like the most about working in 3d is that is brings my ideas one step closer to the real world than for instance painting or drawing…it sets the world as it s background.

Do you have any shows, projects, or exhibits coming up you’d like people to know about?

I have a few new shows coming up like the masters of luxury in Amsterdam in December and a show in Paris in the beginning of 2020, but I’ve just recently decided to work even more and have high expectation for the upcoming year.

 

Where can we see more of your work?

You can check my website www.cedriclaquieze.com as well as my instagram #cedriclaquieze.

Thank you so much to Cedric for participating in our interview!