Not all gardeners are as lucky—or as plucky—as Ingrid Donat. Forty-one years ago, she got a knock on her back door from the workmen she’d hired to excavate a plot at her new home outside Paris. “They told me, ‘We can’t do anything more, because you have too much clay,’ ” Donat recalls. “I was so happy! I said, ‘Give me a piece, please.’ And they set this clay on my kitchen table, with the stones and the grass and everything. I started to sculpt a self-portrait. I was pregnant, and it began like that.”
“It” is a career at the pinnacle of contemporary decorative arts, a busy practice that has changed Donat’s life and brought pleasure to collectors around the world. Donat sculpts furniture and lighting in bronze, and her…
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Architectural Digest (Digital) - 1 Issue, April 2021