Brussels-based Kimy Gringoire, whose jewellery designs push the boundaries of how body adornment can play with expectations, prominently figured the heart shape in her ‘Love Cables’ collection, released in 2022.
Those pieces, she says, were a wearable expression of a bigger idea. Around the time she was expecting her now three-year-old son, Rio, she thought about creating design objects that would translate how she interprets what love is about in materials closely connected to jewellery.
Mexico City’s MASA presents Kimy Gringoire: ‘BigLoveCables’
‘The first idea was seating’ she says. ‘A bench shaped like a vein. A vein is full – pulsing with blood and emotion, full of love.’ She showed a render to Inge Gelaude, a Belgian art director, who installed the bench, a tube light and wall-mounted works in a private exhibition space.
‘At the time it was too risky to make them in bronze or any other metal,’ Gringoire says. Instead, she produced wooden prototypes painted in high-gloss red. ‘In the end, it was perfect because I could play with the red, showing that it was not only about love, but also about blood. In the installation, the mounted ‘BigLoveCables’ seemed to run right through the wall, ‘proof that love is anarchic, it needs freedom. It doesn’t stay in a box. That was the narrative,’ says the designer.
Gringoire also showed renders to Age Salajõe, a co-founder of MASA, a design gallery located in Mexico City’s San Miguel Chapultepec neighbourhood.
‘I think the way Kimy designs her jewelry is just brilliant. The technicality and the multiple ways to use one piece is genius’, says Salajõe. ‘Some years ago, when Kimy briefly lived in Mexico City, we began a conversation about large-scale works, so when she finally sent me the renders of the “BigLoveCables” installation, I was thrilled. Just as she is clever with her jewellery designs, she is equally clever with her lighting and seating designs’.
Her time in the city, a year spanning 2018 and 2019, made its mark on Gringoire. ‘It’s where I found spirituality. When you go to the museum of archaeology [in Mexico City], you just have to cry when you see all those objects from Mayan culture, their beliefs. You can feel that same spirit in the craftsmanship, the food, the hospitality today, too. So going back there, making those heart-shaped metal pieces as I originally conceived them, means a lot to me.’
To produce the handmade pieces, Gringoire worked with craftspeople at a workshop north of Mexico City. Creating the sculpted forms from bronze and steel required two different processes. ‘One was similar to that of creating jewellery,’ she says. ‘It involves pouring the metal into a mould and letting it harden.’
The other method cuts the metal sheets into a pattern and bends and hammers them into the perfect curves her heart shapes require. ‘It takes four people to do this, and one maestro who finds the solutions of how to get the small heart to become bigger,’ explains Gringoire, referencing a large lamp that’s featured in MASA’s Project Room, with a widening diameter.
In the exhibition, Gringoire completes her series with one smaller-scale lamp in aluminium and a pair of limited-edition rings that feature a ‘Love Cable’ with its heart diameter gaping open on one side, giving the illusion of being embedded in the finger.
The discovery process that Gringoire set in motion through her spatial explorations rooted in jewellery seems to have come full circle at MASA – and she’s eager to continue exploring with a full heart.
‘Mexico gave me so much. When I see the pieces in the Project Room for the first time, I will be very emotional,’ she says. ‘It’s a culmination of sorts in a country that has fed me creatively. It’s an important chapter for me.’
‘Kimy Gringoire: BigLoveCables’ runs until 14 December at MASA in Mexico City.
