Incollect Magazine - Issue 3

Issue 3 94 www.incollect.com Juliette Clovis Maison Parisienne Born in 1978, French artist Juliette Clovis has achieved a mastery of fine, traditional ceramic-making techniques. She also has her own unique creative vision inspired by botanical subjects, though it is not uncommon for her singular, mysterious, biomorphic forms to be covered in hundreds of little scales (handmade with ceramics or porcelain and enamel) resembling coiled snakes sleeping. It is this very ambiguity of intention in design that makes her ceramics so fascinating, so much so that Florence Guillier- Bernard, founder of Maison Parisienne, has described her work as “seeming to exist in the ambiguous space between natural and artificial, combining their striking beauty with an underlying impression of menacing danger.” What is organic and what is manmade in the work of Juliette Clovis blurs into one. “Constant experimentation is one of the amazing qualities of the work of Pierre Casenove” says dealer Antoine Vignault, speaking about the French ceramist born in 1943 who is well known for his vase/sculptures inspired by primitive art, myths, and the inherent spirituality of nature. Everything is handmade and fired in his workshop in the Jura mountains of eastern France. His pieces are unique, with an emphasis on formal simplicity and chance, glazed or enameled sandstone or ceramic washed with engobe, which is an underglaze tinted with a colorant. The objects are fired at high temperatures over a few days in Japanese wood-fired ovens, which he builds himself, to allow for random surface textures from the smoke and the ashes. Pierre Casenove OAK Oneofakind Gallery