Karen Gossart & Corentin Laval

Karen Gossart and Corentin Laval work four-handedly a single material – wicker. Basket-weavers and wicker producers, they both grow their own raw material, about twenty different variety of wicker, with diverse characteristics.

Graduating from the Beaux-Arts National School of Fine Arts in Cergy, Karen Gossart trained in the National School of Wicker Production and Basketry in Fayl-Billot in Haute-Marne in the north of France, where she discovered that basket-weaving techniques and wicker as a material were the perfect fit for her desire to create stylistic and original objects.

Having taken an entirely different path, Corentin Laval trained under a “papé”, a traditional basket-weaver from Périgord, an historic province now part of the Aquitaine region. Under his mentor, Corentin learned the ancestral secrets of the “bouyricou”, a local wicker basket, from which he developed his own practice of original contemporary creation, inspired by nature.

With two very different backgrounds, Karen Gossart and Corentin Laval found a common ground in their wicker farm, Oseraie de l’ile, the name of which they borrowed for their artistic duo revolving around the traditional and innovative weaving of wicker.

With maison parisienne, they present a wide variety of their contemporary creations, from one-of-a-kind baskets with ground-breaking forms, to totem in vibrant colors and mysterious forms, to graphic wall panels paying homage to ancestral techniques.