When body stigma is a burning issue
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A mycelium block sprouting oyster mushrooms outside the front door is the first sign that Rodrigo Garcia and Katharina Kaminski’s Paris home is no ordinary pied-à-terre. Step into the open-plan atelier on the third floor of a 17th-century building in the Marais, sparsely furnished with a birch plywood trestle table and stools, and one is hit with a blast of heat and a gust of aromatic fragrance. The gaze is drawn to bulbous clay sculptures by artist Kaminski dotted around the room – some filled with wax and set aflame. Garcia, the founder of Amen, a sustainable candle brand known for its mycelium packaging, laughs as I adjust to the zen-like atmosphere of their live-work studio. This, apparently, has nothing on the evening set-up. “When we do meditation it’s like a proper temple here,” he says.
For Garcia, candlelight has rudimentary significance given that he grew up in Flores, a rural region of Uruguay where electricity wasn’t widely available until the early 1990s. Romantic partners since they met on the beach in their native Uruguay in 2018, Garcia, 38, and Kaminski, 30, were inspired to collaborate while attempting to dine outdoors by candlelight one windy evening in the countryside. Frustrated by repeatedly having to relight the candle, Kaminski began sculpting a protective vessel. The result was two clay bisque light sculptures – Hikari and Philo – in curvilinear forms into which Luz, a smaller clay vessel containing a candle, sits snugly. The sculptures were presented in 2021 with Luminous Beings, an art installation at Design Miami and Paris’s Dover Street Parfums Market.
The pair’s second collaboration of Amen Light Sculptures is a series of clay compositions that resemble huge hollowed-out seed pods. Filled with hand-poured wax, which they say produces 1,200 hours of light, they exude a heady fragrance of sandalwood, vetiver and eucalyptus. First unveiled late last year as part of Kaminski’s debut solo show, Womb, at the Sainte Anne Gallery in Paris, alongside larger forms in marble and bronze, the works explore Kaminski’s recent clarification of her intersex identity, after a blood test confirmed she has XY chromosomes. She was born without a womb or ovaries, and eventually diagnosed with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome (although she does not identify with the word “syndrome”, which she feels is reductive), so her contemplative show was a way to reclaim her fertility. “For many years, I lived very stigmatised about my own body. Now I have a totally different attitude towards it,” she says. “With clay, I am able to express what I can’t put into words. Creativity, fertility, is not just about having a baby. You create a piece of art, you create projects, you create relationships. You need to have strength in this creation power.”
The sold-out show, which saw works purchased by the architect Joseph Dirand, has buoyed Kaminski (model Elle Macpherson and the influential designer Willo Perron have also bought her work). She uses unglazed rustic sand textures for the light sculptures but has since been experimenting with metals such as bronze and aluminium, alongside creating larger-scale commissions for private collectors.
Garcia, meanwhile, has been developing new scents in Grasse, France’s perfume capital, where all his vegetal wax candles are made. This month, Amen is launching new designs – the Amber Light Sculpture in beige texture glazed clay, and Ginger Light Sculpture in white satin glazed clay – while releasing a new batch of the Amen Santalwood Light Sculpture in beige and brown.
Both wearing head-to-toe black, the pair playfully interrupt each other as they discuss their shared desire to provoke conversations. Garcia’s paraffin-free candles, housed in white Limoges porcelain jars and wrapped in biodegradable mycelium packaging, are intended to challenge the persistent lethargy over plastic-free supply chains. For Kaminski, dispelling the stigma around intersex identities – some estimates suggest that as much as 1.7 per cent of the population is born with traits that are intersex, an umbrella term for people born with anatomical or genetic characteristics that don’t match typically binary notions of male or female bodies – is equally vital.
Garcia brings an entrepreneurial zeal to their collaborations; Kaminski an intuitive sensitivity. “We have very complementary energies. Rodrigo is always so enthusiastic about the future, while I bring us to the present moment. If you’re always moving forward then you’re missing something – often moments of enjoyment. And if you’re only in the present, it’s great, but you might stay there. But those perspectives put together are very powerful,” says Kaminski.
Collaboration has taught them to respect each other’s boundaries. They rarely go to parties, choosing instead to meditate at home and watch films on their projector. They run along the Seine at the weekends, invariably ending up at a museum, and occasionally dine at Ojii, a smart Japanese restaurant that has one of Kaminski’s light sculptures on display. The priority is always to find calm, a word that repeatedly crops up during our two-hour conversation. “Katharina brings calm,” says Garcia. “Everything she touches – it’s like she walks into a room and brings harmony.” They steal a glance at each other, and laugh. “Well, this is like couples therapy,” says Kaminski. Garcia nods: “We can pay you in candles.”