Shown at Paris’s Galerie Gosserez in 2011, French designer Elise Gabriel’s ‘Embrace’ series comprises a collection of furniture made using a wondrous, innovative 21st century material: Zelfo. A cellulose-based bioplastic, Zelfo is made from 100% recycled paper and textiles; when liquid, it is 95% water and, once dry, it is incredibly strong—and completely biodegradable. For Gabriel, Zelfo offered a mediation between chaos and control, and a fresh challenge: “I got fully immersed in [Zelfo]: handling; formalities; observations; confrontations; experimentation,” Gabriel reflects. “An incessant coming and going between my intuition and the reality of the material, between my wishes and its demands. Zelfo is living matter. Of course I can guide, squeeze and trap it. But in response to that there is always an unpredictable quiver, a twist or a contraction against the grain.”
