About

In January 2020 I attended an exhibition of H.R. Giger's work and something in me shifted. I didn't  want to just admire his art from behind a glass, I wanted to own a piece of the collection and take it back home. That feeling never really left, and eventually it became Avant Forms.

I make sculptural bags. Not handbags in the traditional sense, built from a wide net of inspiration: abstract and surreal art, nature, mathematics, the music I listen to while I work, and anything else that manages to catch my attention. Every design is my own. I chase a dark, elegant, abstract and futuristic aesthetic.

None of this happens the traditional way, and that's the point. Each piece begins as a digital sculpture and is brought into the world through UV resin printing rather than cut and stitched from leather which means I'm not limited by what a needle and thread can do. What follows is slow, hands-on work: hours of careful finishing, painting, and sealing before a piece is ready. I think of this as a new kind of craftsmanship equal parts of digital sculpting, 3d modeling, mechanical solutions, and old-fashioned handwork, no matter how modern the tools in the middle get.

I'm making pieces of wearable art, produced in small numbers, that let you carry a little bit of the strange and the beautiful into an ordinary day.

This is still early days just one person doing the sculpting, the materialization, and the finishing, piece by piece, out of genuine obsession rather than a industrialized production. If that's the kind of thing you want to be part of, I'd love for you to look closer.

— Esau, founder of Avant Forms