Vallauris

The aim of this project, which took place over a period of five years, was to foster an interaction between designers, who usually create industrial products, and the potters of Vallauris, who possess outstanding age-old expertise, and to energise local production methods. My intervention is based on the often fraught relationship between craftsmen and industry. For Plate series, we distorted, cut and stuck together pressed plates–standard pottery objects–before firing them. This is the origin of a family of containers that are hybrid in terms of the way they are made: they are both "hand made" and "machine made". The constraint I imposed on the craftsmen for Cheese plate and Low table was a little perverse, because it involved reproducing a computer–generated image by hand. And yet it turned out that there is an ancestral tool that creates shading very similar to the kind produced using Photoshop.

Commissioned by:
Ville de Vallauris - Golfe-Juan

Ministère de la Culture et de la Communication DRAC Provence Alpes-Côte-d'Azur

Courtesy:
ToolsGalerie

Photos:
Morgane Le Gall: 1, 6
Robert Stadler: 2-5