‘A condo complex for insects’: Meet the celebrated designer making furniture for bugs

Entomologically obsessed Marlène Huissoud makes furniture in collaboration with – sometimes even for – the insects she so loves

As a child, the French design artist Marlène Huissoud helped her beekeeping parents tend hives in the Alps. As an adult, she helps the honeybees – and other insects, too – by creating whimsical limited-edition sculptures and furniture from natural materials such as silkworm cocoons and honeybee resin.
“I really want to educate people and raise awareness about the importance of insects and biodiversity in our lives,” she tells me in her studio on the ground floor of a 1930s townhouse in the Paris suburb of Fontenay-sous-Bois. “I want to open a dialogue between humans and insects.” To do that, she says,“I develop different artefacts – I don’t call them objects or sculptures – to emphasise the voice of the insect in the human world.”
Take Huissoud’s latest piece, Double Cocoon cabinet, made of oak and covered with 12,000 cocoons glazed with propolis, the tar-like resin produced by bees. The cabinet will be exhibited by the Sarah Myerscough Gallery at the PAD London contemporary design fair on Berkeley Square, which opens on Tuesday and runs until 13 October.
The piece, like all Huissoud’s work, is wholly respectful of nature. For the body, which looks as though it is slathered in glossy black olives, she sourced the cocoons from India, where the silkworms have been allowed to hatch; normally in industrial silk production, cocoons are boiled, killing the worms. For the base, Huissoud charred the oak, which is sculpted into a soft, organic shape that looks like driftwood, and varnished it with bee resin. Because of the resin, the piece has a slight, pleasing aroma of honey.
She shows off a few other pieces, such as Frozen, a lumpy bench made from a mass of pewter cocoons, and the Cocoon stool, a pile-up of bronze cocoons; both were made using the lost-wax casting process. Please Stand By is a large white clay chair not meant for use – at least not by humans. “See all the black holes?” she says, pointing to small perforations all over the piece. “They are habitats for pollinators.” 
The chair, made in collaboration with ecologists Robert Francis and Brandon Mak of King’s College London in 2019, was sculpted in natural clay and waterproofed with cactus wax. The idea is to place it in an urban environment – say on a terrace or in a public garden – and insects will move into it, like a condominium complex. The chair is to be included in an exhibition at London’s Design Museum next May.
Huissoud’s work has been so trailblazing and transformative, she received the Grand Prix de la Création for Engagement in Design during a ceremony in the Paris city hall last month. 
“What would my work be without the mini world of insects? How important these little beings are to us as human beings, and to the harmony of the planet,” the 34-year-old told a crowd of more than 1,000, including her beekeeping father, Pierre, as she accepted the prize, which came with a €18,000 purse. “I invite you to open your eyes constantly to see what surrounds us.”
At first Huissoud wasn’t sure that creating was her calling. Her childhood was hippie, with summers spent in the countryside with her apiculturist parents, collecting honey. “We lived in a small caravan in the middle of the field,” she recalls, adding, “I didn’t realise how cool that was until I was older.” Although she studied art at school, she says, “I was scared to be an artist, because we were living in the middle of nowhere.”
Instead, she attended nursing school and interned at a psychiatric hospital. There, she says, she learnt “very intense things about humanity”, but it was not her vocation. She quit and enrolled in the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts de Lyon. “The first lecture was in a big theatre, all about art deco – this very intellectual approach to art,” she recalls. “It was such a clash with my view of art. I thought, ‘What am I doing here?’”
Nevertheless, she stuck with it and earned her BA in textile design. From there, she went to work for the Grand Théâtre de Genève, creating special effects and costumes for ballets and operas. “Huge jewellery, huge hats, war scenes – every day was different and interesting,” she says. “But my dream was to go to Central Saint Martins.” So she did.
“At the time [the 2010s], London was this explosion of art and design – very experimental, everything was possible,” she remembers. “It was open to experiments and failures. That’s the most important thing when you create: try everything, and if you fail, try something else. In France, it was more like, ‘No, be shy and be careful. Maybe this is too much.’ In London, the doors were really open.”
It was then that she realised that her summers in the buzzing fields, where, as she puts it, she “had made a connection with insects”, could inform her practice. She began working with the resin that “bees take from trees and use as a cement inside the hive”, she explains. She experimented with using glass-blowing techniques on it to create new shapes, and developed a leather-like biomaterial with it. She hands me a swatch. It has a smooth texture and an earthy brown hue, and it smells like beeswax.
She invented another biomaterial with silkworm cocoons. “When you deconstruct the cocoon” – which she does with a very fine needle, meticulously unravelling the thread – “you can extract fibres and a natural glue and make paper, like felting,” she says. She varnishes this paper with her honeybee resin.
This became part of her master’s degree project, From Insects: An Exploration of Insect Materials, in 2014, which was an immediate hit in the design and art worlds. The following year, the UK Design Council named Huissoud one of Britain’s 70 rising stars, and her work has since been exhibited in the V&A, the Science Museum, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. The automotive industry expressed interest in using her new material in car production, but she passed. “They are always thinking about industrialisation,” she says. “My family’s values are very important to me, and I wanted to respect them.”
That means remaining artisanal. She moved back to France, found a studio, and set to making her elaborate, unique pieces. She produces only two or three a year. “Some take more than 1,500 hours – it’s ant’s work,” she says with a laugh. “It’s my responsibility to not make a lot, and just to give a strong message on the importance of insects and biodiversity.”
Huissoud’s time in Paris is now coming to a close. She’s returning to the Alps, with her three-year-old daughter, to be closer to her father, who is widowed and retired, and to her artistic wellspring, bugs and bees. Among her projects there – funded by her new prize money – she will build an insect monument in a field, to use as an educational tool on biodiversity, and to plant mulberry trees for silkworms, so she can harvest her own cocoons.
“I need nature around me,” she says, as she picks a ripe raspberry off the canes scaling the wall of her matchbook garden in the urban cement jungle.
“Don’t we all?” 
Recommended
4/5
4/5
4/5