Pauline Rip
- La Tannerie Fantastique
- Riding Ghosts
- Elficology : the harvest of morning dew
- Meet Meat
- Lowfoot
Information
Pauline Rip
Information
DESIGN SCENOGRAPHY
Co-created with Jonas Hejduk
Exhibition
• La Tannerie Fantastique, Chapelle du Saint-Esprit, Auray, France, June 2025 - September, 2025. Solo show.
• Diner is served, Design Biennale Rotterdam, Schiedam, 2025
Prize
• Bourse de Création, winners, Cultural Centre Athéna, 2024.
Collaboration
• Lecture, EESAB Lorient, 2025.
• Workshop, EESAB Lorient, 2025.
• Sponsored by Canon Nederland, 2025.
Press
• Ouest France,2025
• Le télégramme, 2025.
• Où sortir ?, 2025.
This ecological fable reinvents traditional crafts within a fantastic folklore rooted in Brittany, bearing witness to the triumph of nature over human exploitation. It immerses the viewer in a marvelous yet unsettling world where legends come to life, while conveying a contemporary message about the importance of respecting the environment.
Blending dreamlike poetry with the macabre, this monumental installation immerses visitors in the world of a Breton tannery where the hides of imaginary creatures are processed. It echoes a local reality: in Auray (city in Britanny), two tanneries are said to have once polluted the waters to the point of causing a death by tetanus. This incident became the starting point for exploring contemporary issues: the exploitation of the giant Hok-Bras becomes a metaphor for human control over nature and the impoverishment of soils; and the emergence of a new protective deity in Celtic mythology, C’holos Glas, the seaweed colossus born of pollution, transforms a reviled symbol into an ecological figure.
The space is filled with references to Breton culture: motifs inspired by traditional costumes, a specific color palette, a tribute to designer Jeanne Malivel, a Vannetais song created for the occasion, and a concert by the band Cheval de Trait—until it becomes impossible to tell whether reality inspires fiction, or the other way around.
The scenographic objects—benches, mirrors, lamps, vase, blankets—remain functional in a domestic setting, echoing an approach that seeks to bring fiction into our interiors. No animal leather has been used: the two designers believe in the power of fiction to rethink our ways of living and our material cultures, in line with sobriety and respect for life. For fiction, by its very essence, liberates the imagination.
“We have every reason to be concerned about the disappearance of the species that exist today. But who worries about the disappearance of beings that do not exist? For they too are greatly endangered!”
— Bill François, The Eloquence of the Sardine, Fayard, 2019
Exhibitions
• TAC (Temporary Art Center), What a time to be alive, DDW19 (Dutch Design Week 2019), Eindhoven.
• Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam, 2019.
Press
• DAMN magazine n°75 (pp.104-105), On information overload, Emma Singleton, Avril 2020.
• Metcha, the oracle of leather design culture, Domesticating the unknown, digital magazine, Novembre 2019.
• NY Center for Book Arts, Interspecies Futures archive, Oscar Salguero, New-York, US, 2022.
• IN/SEARCH RE/ SEARCH, Gabrielle Kennedy (ed.), «Riding Ghosts», Imagining scenarios through art and design (pp.214-217), Amsterdam, 2020.
Seeing isn’t believing but believing is seeing… even if you have been looking through your mind’s eye. We can all think up the image of the Loch Ness monster (Nessie) with its whale like body and small head, or picture a Yeti roaming Himalayan mountains with a body covered in reddish-brown hair. As humans we have a natural ability to reason the unreasonable and make sense of the obscure, Nessie and Yeti have never been found but they still live in Scotland and the Himalayas. Emma Singleton DAMN magazine
From a in-depth research and developed admiration for the illogical beauty of these animals, Riding Ghosts poetically works to harness their control. Through the data gathered by the cryptozoologists and help from a statistician, two bespoke saddles are presented. These technical objects highlight our ability to theorise the invisible, and therefore domesticate it.
By materialising 'irrational' data into an object of domestication, the chimeras come to life: the saddles are beautiful, credible, technical, the curves align with the measurements established by the researchers. Suddenly, the existence of these ghostly creatures is no longer to be proven, because true or false, they have given shape to a physical reality where we have succeeded in dominating the unseen.
Riding Ghosts can be seen as a design reaction to the anguish of a modern world in need of great discoveries and thrills ; it plays with levels of plausibility and allows the audience to confront their own beliefs and create discussion, and even polemics : does something have to true to be valuable ?
Riding Ghosts - Designing with the unreasonable
The publication Riding Ghosts brings together some of the sprawling research carried out by cryptozoologists — tireless seekers of hidden creatures such as the Yeti and the Loch Ness Monster — who often dedicate their lives to this pursuit. Gathering information from disparate media has been a long process.
Riding Ghosts seeks to shed light on data and knowledge often ridiculed, since this research is based on facts that cannot be conclusively proven — yet this does not make them any less valuable.
Graphic design
Benedetta Pompili
Elficology : the harvest of morning dew
Exhibitions
• Soon exhibited at Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris. 12/2025-01/2026
• Dutch Design Week 2021, "Unesco Ghosts’ files", Beursgebouw, DDW21, Eindhoven.
• Taiwan Design Museum, August-September-October 2023
Press
• Dezeen architecture and design magazine, "Pauline Rip designs cultural artefacts[...]", Amy Freason, January, 2022.
• Designing stories: What the folk!, Design Academy Eindhoven, Nadine Botha, 2021. • Le Monde, "A Eindhoven, l’école de design [...]", Le Monde, Jessica Gourdon, February 2023. Taiwan Design Museum for “We-We futures”, cur. Chun Ting Che, Taiwan.
Residency
• Mediamatic Foundation Art & New technology, Amsterdam, NL, 2023
Prize
• Finalist COAL PRIZE “Eau Douce” 2025
PRICE DELIBERATION 12 DECEMBER 2025 at Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Paris.
Elficology: the harvest of morning dew is a multidisciplinary project blending speculative design, performance, craftsmanship, and storytelling. It imagines a fictitious cultural practice — the harvesting of dew — an entirely imaginary custom built upon the peculiar criteria of UNESCO’s intangible heritage. In doing so, the project questions how a practice might be legitimized and preserved, even if it is not “real” in the traditional sense. Who, then, decides the value of a given field of knowledge? Could not a simple drop of dew also attain political status and institutional recognition?
Inspired by elficology — defined by Pierre Dubois as “the ecology of the soul” — the project weaves connections between institutional bureaucracy and folklore, alchemy, science, and artisanal know-how. It seeks to raise awareness of local ecosystems by layering a fictional dimension onto contemporary environmental issues, rediscovering the landscapes around us and thus countering the prevailing sense of eco-anxiety. The design of these ritual objects, costumes, “official” administrative documents, and performative gestures creates a delicate dialogue between humans and nature, giving rise to what one might call an eco-fairy.
Elficology : the harvesting of morning dew
Co-created with Jonas Hejduk
Exhibition
• Het nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam - 2019
While man has the right to kill animals, he has a responsibility for the way that this killing is executed. All around the world and since the dawn of time, human beings have always used animals as offerings for their Gods, thus demonstrating the sanctity of food, life and death. Today however, after hundreds of years of industrialism, the act of killing animals has become taboo and death has been abstracted. The production of meat is sterilised: there is no more blood, no more bones, no more heads. The animal is disappearing, replaced by
its image of the supermarket product.
Meet Meat does not criticise the act of eating meat. Rather, it aims to reveal what industries hide in their slaughterhouses.
Co-created with Jonas Hejduk
Exhibition
• Low-Foot, Canon Customer Experience Center, Venlo, 2023.
Collaborations
• Commissioned by Canon Nederland, 2023.
• Sponsored by cardboard company Kohlschein, 2023.
Reimagining the reverse side of the famous Bigfoot photo taken in 1967, a fictional campsite is constructed as the potential location where the photo was captured. Elements from the image, such as tree trunks, are recreated in low resolution, prompting the audience to question: how does belief in Bigfoot shape our perception of the familiar to the point of contaminating reality?
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Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Maecenas in tortor risus. Praesent rhoncus neque a nulla volutpat, sit amet molestie nisi luctus. Vivamus sit amet pellentesque tortor. Maecenas quis egestas urna. Morbi volutpat risus in lacinia volutpat. Nulla placerat faucibus erat ac tempor. Praesent et urna at arcu viverra vulputate eget hendrerit odio.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Maecenas in tortor risus. Praesent rhoncus neque a nulla volutpat, sit amet molestie nisi luctus. Vivamus sit amet pellentesque tortor. Maecenas quis egestas urna. Morbi volutpat risus in lacinia volutpat. Nulla placerat faucibus erat ac tempor. Praesent et urna at arcu viverra vulputate eget hendrerit odio.