La Lampe Table Lamp in Wood
by Olive® · Montpellier, France

I was born in Paris and spent ten years in Brussels as an art director, building visual identities within my own graphic design studio, Thinkbig. That work sharpened my sense of structure and rigour, but something remained unanswered: a pull toward a different kind of creation, rooted in imagination rather than in the brief. I moved to Montpellier, in the south of France, to follow that pull, and it was there, as a self-taught artist, that Olive® was born.As a child, I found refuge in an imagined world, a parallel reality that felt more honest than the one around me. Olive® is my way of giving that world physical form. Every piece sits at the edge of the real and the unreal, what I call the "(un)real", playing with perspective, optical effects, and distortions of scale until an object feels both familiar and slightly displaced. I work with different materials, ones that carry a story, chosen for their durability and responsible origin. Everything is made locally.Beyond material, each collection carries a personal thread, foundations, scars, cycles, worked through form rather than stated outright. I am drawn to what is raw, instinctive, and unornamented: creations built without artifice, honest in their making, that invite whoever encounters them to reconsider where the real ends and the imagined begins.