ceramics
A huge thank you to my teachers,
Anne Deberly-Rome and Laure Sulger-Libessart, at Un jour d’atelier.
I fell in love with ceramics while on my first tour of Japan in november 2006, and ever since then I’d wanted to take ceramics lessons, which was of course impossible while I was doing concerts, as it would have meant missing too many lessons . So when I found myself with no musical inspiration in mid 2008, it seemed the perfect moment to just go for it.
I started taking lessons in September 2008, first with hand-modelling techniques on stoneware, but I quickly moved to another workshop which seemed better suited to my needs, Un jour d’atelier. The clay there was earthenware, and while I personally would have liked to keep on working with stoneware (among other things because of the glazes you can develop on it), it was a fantastic change in terms of the teaching and techniques I was exposed to.
Once a week, I took wheel throwing lessons in the morning with Anne Deberly-Rome, and in the afternoon worked on hand-modelling techniques with Laure Sulger-Libessart. I was completely thrilled with this new experience : ceramics really engage both the body and the mind, and it really helped me to accept that at that moment I couldn’t make music and that it was OK to do and enjoy something else while going through this rough patch.
I took lessons for two years and would have loved to continue, but when I started to regain the desire to make music again, it became obvious that it was too hard for me to do both activities (or rather three activities, with the stone carving – see the sculpture section) at the same time, and what’s more this bustle of extra-musical activity began to feel in contradiction with my desire to live a slower life… Leaving Paris helped me to settle the matter, and since then (July 2010) I haven’t touched a bit of clay, but I like to think that one day I will have time again to pursue this wonderful activity.
NB 1: I’m sharing the pictures of the objects above because I feel they are part of what I’ve done on a general “creative” level, but of course I make no claim to be “a ceramist”… And although I did make them myself, quite clearly without my teachers’ guidance they would have amounted to a lot less.
NB 2:yes, that teapot is missing a handle, in the rush of leaving Paris I didn’t get the time to hunt for one, and they’re pretty hard to find – if you know of a good place to buy teapot handles or if any of you know how to make one, please contact me !
NB 3: the head at the end of the photo gallery has been my only attempt at making a“sculpture”-like object in clay, right when I started the stone-carving course, because I was terribly worried that it would be a prerequisite to know how to model clay in that way before sculpting with stone. Well, I was wrong, but still, I think I did well to at least try, and if you think it looks like Brancusi’s “Sleeping muse” gone wrong, you’re right, because I was actually trying to make some sort of copy (yes, you can laugh – I did too !)
