Galerie Mélissa Paul

Born in Marseille, Agnès Debizet first started making ceramics in 1980 at a night class organized by the Paris municipal authorities. “The contact with clay was decisive,” she recalls. “As soon as I touched it, I fell in love with it. I liked the way it allowed you to improvise so many forms.” She went on to train with Albert Minot and first showed her work in 1989 in a medieval cloister in the heart of the French capital. For the past 20 years, her creations have regularly been exhibited in sites of exceptional beauty, whether they be abbeys or châteaux, or the Forest of Compiègne.

Her dual background in Literature and Plastic Arts has shaped her practice, allowing her to create her own narratives while transforming traditional ceramic techniques into thought-provoking pieces. “I never thought about whether they may be sold or not.”, she recalls. Merging imagery of the domestic, the decorative and the sculptural, her works are immutable, strange and definitely unique.

For the past 40 years, Agnès Debizet has taken a rather unusual and distinctive approach to her craft. “I am radically opposed to mastering traditional methods,” she says. “I prefer to let accidents happen and to repair them if necessary.” She creates her forms using the coiling technique and works with stoneware covered with a layer of porcelain before firing. The result is a crackled surface, which she fills in with black earthenware before returning the piece to the kiln, often at very high temperatures. According to her, “It’s quite a risky process.”

Her inspirations come from ancient civilizations of the Middle East and Latin America, as well as the natural world. Solely driven by the desire to tell stories through her art, she has created a vernacular all her own, displaying the same vocabulary of forms across a wide range of pieces—which may stretch to beyond two metres in height.