Discarded Objects are Beautified with Colorful Coral-Like Growths by Stephanie Kilgast

Stephanie Kilgast takes discarded objects like tin cans, jam jars, and old cameras and embellishes them with vibrant amalgamations of coral-like growths. The artist honed her detail-oriented skills by making hyperrealistic miniature food, and she continues to use polymer clay and hand tools to craft her artworks. Mushrooms, crystals, beetles, and abstract forms sprout from the everyday objects that Kilgast sources from thrift stores and trash cans.

In an artist statement on her website, she describes her work as “an ode to life, where plants and fungi meet insects, animals and minerals. These encounters are growing in a colorful swirl of diversity, and the erratic growth develops on found objects, in a dialogue between humanity and nature.”

Inspired by natural forms, Stéphanie Kilgast’s artwork is an ode to nature. She grows colorful organic sculptures on human-made objects, celebrating the beauty of nature in a dialogue with humanity, questioning the lost balance between human activities and nature.

She built her reputation and her sculpting skills around hyperrealistic miniature food sculptures. Her work has been exhibited in America, Asia and Europe.

In 2015, she worked on her « daily veggie challenge », an artistic project where she sculpted a different miniature vegetable or fruit every day to present the vast quantity of edible plants, while encouraging to reduce our meat and animal products intake for environmental reasons. French, Born in 1985, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, currently resides in Vannes, France.

Kilgast, who is based in France, often documents her creative process in videos on Instagram, YouTube, and Facebook. In addition to sharing her work with her large online audience, the artist exhibits widely, and was most recently a part of the themed group show “Monochrome” at Art Number 23 in London.