Eco-responsibility as a priority

Text published on Facebook and Instagram on March 4, 2024.

By deciding to prioritize eco-responsibility in my practice, a real paradigm shift has taken place in my workshop, in my relationship with the material, with my profession.

Since I left school, almost 20 years ago, I have always approached ceramics by thinking first of all about what I wanted to create, by putting the aesthetics of my creations as a priority. Afterwards, my research consisted of discovering which raw materials and which techniques would allow me to achieve the desired result, often through a series of experiments.

There is a wide range of materials available to ceramicists, which makes the possibilities endless... In short, we are truly privileged to have so many different materials at our disposal. And I must admit that I have spent most of my career not worrying too much about the provenance of materials. There is a lot to be said about the traceability of ceramic materials, and I will come back to this in more depth later...

Although ideally I do not want to compromise the aesthetics of my ceramics, my research will now take a different path, in which I will voluntarily force myself to use materials that I am certain are more in line with my values, thus making my production more sustainable. As with many things, eco-responsibility is a question of choice.

For me, constraint is not necessarily negative, on the contrary: eliminating options only makes the path to follow clearer.