Beepy Bella's World

Get to know Lalonde as we pick her brain below.

First and foremost, who and what is Beepy Bella?

Beepy Bella is handmade, one-of-a-kind jewelry that's based on fairytales, fantasy, and inner utopias. My main goal when I was making jewelry or when I first started was that I wanted to bridge the gap between adulthood and childhood. Being 24 now, I feel like I've recently grown enough from my childhood self that I can feel that I am a different type of person now. And I'm growing into adulthood, but there's definitely things that I don't want to lose from childhood—like fantasy, believing fairies are real, magic, potential, and everything. And I think that's sort of like escapism and surrealism really helps me to cope with everyday life. Especially just living in the city. It kind of helps calm my anxiety and feel more at peace. You know, it's like this cathartic method, every necklace I make is like a painting. Because I don't design it beforehand; I look at colors, and I feel them. I definitely think I have synesthesia, so I can taste and like feel colorways. And I have words in my head, so there's all these like external senses that I'm using. It just helps tying it to my past. I always have considered myself a fine artist before anything else. I went to Parsons and studied fine art for four years and I felt like jewelry is this continuation of my art practice. I approach it more as sculptural elements and one-of-a-kind artworks rather than commercial products. 

So you talked about this utopia—what do you envision in this utopia? What does it look like to you?

I love this question, because I think something that I try to invoke in every Beepy Bella piece is for the wearer to attain and manifest their own utopia. So I just want to like clarify that this is just my utopia. And I hope that the person who is wearing my jewelry can use that piece to bridge into their own. But basically, mine is just a world full of nature—gorgeous, like streaming little waterfalls and actual real-life unicorns. And you know, the trees can speak to you, and you can laugh with them, and the fairies can dance, and there are sparkles before you go to bed. And when there's rain, you see the midnight sky rise. And just this whole world of positivity and little things that make me feel safe and happy. It's this whole idea of scale. One of my favorite movies is the Studio Ghibli movie Arietty, and tiny people live in this gorgeous fantasy cottage. You just see this girl and her perspective as she walks through the garden and sees little blades of grass or like huge gigantic trees and ladybugs are like these giant monsters. So I really love this idea of like playing with scale and viewing the world from a different perspective. I think in my personal utopia, I definitely would be like a really tiny, small creature, and I would love to see how like blades of grass would be like soaring above me. I think I would really love to just feel more cozy in the world.

What three icons or what three people would you bring to this utopia, dead or alive?

That's a good question. Someone who inspired me when I was younger was definitely Dr. Seuss. I really loved his illustrations and his playfulness with words. And I think that definitely exposed me into this whole whimsical world. And then I definitely just have like favorite artists. I have an actual Google document that I keep of my favorite artists. Let me pull it up. Let's see. [Pulls up document] So one of my favorite artists is Laurie Simmons—she creates really cool different collages and photographs with dollhouses. She used different everyday objects and then placed them with these doll house legs on the underneath. So it had this really weird scale effect. And she also makes these really cool collages. One of my favorite series of hers is the Cafe of the Inner Mind, because I love that it showcases inner thoughts while in a different reality. I feel like that's something I relate to—I'm always thinking about my fantasy world, even though I'm, like, at the office. Another one of my favorite artists is Anika Yi. I would love to have her there. I mean, there's so many people, like Anna Mendieta obviously. I would love to have a little tea party with her. There's a lot of different artists.

So you're from Switzerland, Paris, and New Jersey. Has that inspired you in any way?

I think that is the root of my obsession with escapism and fantasy. French was my first language, and then I moved to the US and completely lost it. I'm not as fluent now, it's so sad. Every time I moved, and I moved around four to five times when I was younger, I felt like I lost my identity, and I had to rebuild it. I think part of why I love escapism is because it's the only thing that I feel like saved me during that time. All of my external scenarios are changing, my styles, and my thoughts are changing. But my inner escape, my inner imagination, and appreciation for nature still lives and is still is thriving. I was able to deep dive into my own creative fantasies always. I feel like my super power as an artist is being able to live within my creativity rather than my external surroundings. So when things were harder to get through and adjust to, I always had that inside of myself. It really helps me to just grow in the way that I wanted to. Like, when I moved from Paris to New Jersey, I'd go every single night on a walk at like 9 p.m., and I would just walk past all these trees into this pond. And I would just look at trees, and be like, "Wow, I really feel their energy." I really feel like trees hear everything. And they know all the secrets. And I just remember thinking and feeling that deep appreciation for the magic of nature around me.

That's eco-feminism.

Yeah. I love that. I looked it up in high school and college, because I was like, "Oh, what is this thing that everyone keeps telling me about?"

So Beepy Bella is releasing a book, Beepy Bella's Fairytails. Can you tell us about that?

When I was studying fine art, I created a Bella magazine initially, because I love graphic design, and I love looking at old book covers. That's one of my favorite forms of inspiration for my artwork. The thing that made me instigate doing the book now is that I was realizing that I handmake and create all of my own designs and imagery on my Instagram.

As an artist, that's something that comes natural to me. The world of my imagery being consistent is really important to me. So I have all these extra images that I just never had time to post on Instagram, didn't feel comfortable posting, or felt like they were too repetitive in a way. And I was like, "What can I do with them? Because they're good, and I don't want them to be left unseen." So it was like, "Why don't I just create a book of all these images, essentially outtakes of artworks that I've never got to post on social media?"

And how did that evolve into the creation of each page becoming a cohesive book?

That eventually evolved into having an open submissions with my social media followers where they could submit any fantasy-based artwork. And that's something that I feel really happy and appreciative about, because this whole fantasy and escape for a long time was an internal process and an internal part of myself. I didn't really share that in class or with others that much. So this was the first time as an artist that I felt like I was opening up my fantasy to everyone around me. And one that they could also participate in and bring their own fantasies into mine. It was a really inspiring time where people were sending me collages of mushrooms with fairies and everyone just really got the prompts! Like they're thinking in the same way as me, and I've never had that before.

So what are some of the messages or ongoing themes of this book?

This book is meant to bridge the gap between adulthood and childhood. I wanted to make people feel more comfortable as adults in indulging in their childhood curiosities of the world while still keeping that spark alive of imagination and fantasy. That's what this book represents to me and hopefully to everyone that reads it or sees this as an unleashing of imagination. You can go wild, you can go crazy, explore all the experimental parts of your mind and your thoughts. Don't be afraid to be anything but yourself, even if it's weird or too quirky for others.

I also wanted to reuse all of my old photo shoots and repurpose them. And I think that's another point about sustainability that isn't really talked about in the fashion industry—content. The carbon footprint of making content for photo shoots, traveling there, lights, production... I just think about carbon footprints of editorial photo shoots. So, I wanted to repurpose and recycle my shoots and create them in a new context so that they can be digested in another way. We should be more open to seeing content repurposed in different ways, but it shouldn't be outfits you only wear once once on Instagram. And it's just, as a matter of sustainability and consumerism, basically breaking that cycle and being more comfortable with seeing things multiple times on social media.

But I feel like it was just like a really nice way to also hold something in your hands rather than in your phone that I created. My mom also wrote a fairytale for it. She was self isolating the South of France and wrote a little story about a fairy who lives in a poppy flower. In terms of physicality, the book is like a nice deep purple, eggplant linen cover with a silver foil design. So all of it is metallic and shiny, which is kind of just to like replicate my jewelry and metal work. There's a few parts to this project, because once I was creating the book, I was thinking about an all-sensory experience, just tying in back to the utopia. I was like, "How can I help the viewer and the reader deep dive into fantasy of their own making while reading this book?" So I had my sister create an ambiant soundscape to listen to as you read the book, and it times out perfectly—it's kind of like this all-sensory experience. We actually are producing the soundtrack on vinyl, which is coming out early June, and it's also a nice purple eggplant vinyl. And we hand-created the cover and the artwork for it. I'll be selling them as a bundle when they're both completed.

During quarantine on May 1st, we did launch the book virtually as a gallery online with GMO gallery. It is our new platform that was created during quarantine by my partner to make art more accessible. So it's basically this whole 3-D world that has my different pages of the book hanging as paintings, and you can walk through the space. There's gigantic mushrooms. There's a huge castle that has all my photo shoots in it.

So what's next for Beepy Bella?

I just created socks, which were a new sort of accessory that I was really excited about. They're neon pink, neon green, and like a purple Argyle sock with my logo on it. Something that I'm obsessed with is actually shoes. And I love how socks can really be an extension of your shoe. It can really make an outfit so much more eclectic. And I think that's also part of my inspiration as an artist, and self-expression has always been the way I dress. I find a lot of therapy in creating my outfits, because it also references that fantasy world, the world that I see myself living in when I do have that like surrealist escapism in my mind. That is something that I do with my jewelry too; I try to bring in that element of style. Like, you can be wearing just a white tee shirt and jeans, but you'll have like this Beepy Bella necklace on and people will be like, "That's so wild." It's a really crazy piece. 

In terms of collabs, I just had one with Haejin Park, who is an amazing Brooklyn-based illustrator, and she does mainly watercolors. She watercolored some clay pendants for me, and I strung them, and we had a double-string necklace, which was kind of like the state signature of that launch. I'm also working on creating some logo necklaces. So basically just my signature pearl necklace, but having my logo custommade with some stones.