AT: What is your first approach to the work? How would you describe your practice?
LD: My practice is above all an intuitive and empirical exploration of the characteristics of industrial materials, especially metals. I also examine, in my work, the peculiarities of natural elements that I find at the seaside or in the mountains. First I study their potentials and their breaking points, then I combine and synthesize them. By dint of trying I move things, break them, start and start again, try them on the floor, on the wall, on the ceiling, in a corner, I end up finding interesting connections which tell my personal stories.
AT: What do you aim to reach with your work?
LD: From a very young age, I have had a feeling of vertigo, I know that life is precarious, that it does not answer to anyone. We can fall, die, be destroyed from one day to the next. However, we resist, we keep standing up, and that encourages me. I try to show it in my work. I want to make viewers feel the tension of my sculptures and installations, both their fragility and stability. My aerial pieces constantly oscillate between lightness and heaviness, balance and cantilever, attraction and risk. The notion of danger is often part of the experience.
AT: What are your favorite tools and materials for working?
LD: My favorite tool is my body! I rarely use tools and even less machines to work, because I don’t want to cheat, I want to show how materials hold together on their own, without welding or glue I don’t like to hide anything. I hang with weights, ropes, elastic cords.
AT: What do you feel while you work? Do you usually think about the final outcome beforehand?
LD: I’m very focused, I forget my phone and the things that bother me. I try to be calm, to be quieter and ready to welcome my ideas. I never know what it’s going to look like, because my work goes step by step, putting the materials together. It might take a few minutes, or a few months, but at one point I feel it’s good.
