Portrait/Interview: The Ceramicists
The Ceramicists: Stéphanie Sommet in her studio
Earlier this week I met up with Stéphanie Sommet from The Ceramicists in her London studio.
Originally from Paris and a Central St Martin graduate, she has worked on bespoke pieces for The Shard and has recently been commissioned by VOGT Landscape & Architecture Studio to create prototypes of ceramic fountains for a luxury development in Dubai.
I had met Stéphanie many years before through a mutual mosaicist friend; we almost lost contact, as you do in big cities, until I started following her work on Instagram, and completely fell for it. Eager to see more and actually experience the feel of her objects, I decided she would be the perfect sitter to start this Portrait/Interview series.
And she definitely was.
The Ceramicists: Stéphanie Sommet at work
How would you define your practice in 2 sentences?
Because I like to produce honest pieces of work, I choose to ignore overflow lines
when I design, within the limits of practicalities. To me a well crafted raw material
is the secret of an object of quality that will never go out of style.
Where do you get your inspiration from?
Inspirations always comes suddenly and from nowhere…
It’s often late just before I fall asleep or while daydreaming, which is often!
It never comes from design shows or shops; to me following a trend is an anti-design process.
How do you find clients? What do you show them?
I get my clients mostly from word of mouth; I also share my work quite a bit on social medias. I’m @theceramicists on instagram & Twitter, please come and say hi!
You experiment a lot with materials.
What is the most surprising material you’ve worked with?
All raw materials are interesting but funnily enough the most surprising one to me is
definitely CERAMIC! Materials all come with their own technicalities, but ceramic ticks
so many boxes, it requires water, fire; you can carve it, cast it, smooth it, fold it, stretch it, throw it… It has so much potential, it is such a versatile material that you always learn from it.
I’m fascinated by your Cities Color Palette collection, could you tell us a bit about it?
This series represents London, Paris, Bruxelles, Porto and Athens through they reflective materials. For example I used terracotta for the bricks of London, plaster of Paris for Paris, and sand by the sea side of each places to make they own concrete color tones.
I consider Cities Color Palette my signature work.
A spa with no walls
While shooting an entirely different project at the Sanderson Hotel in Central London a few weeks ago, I came across the incredible wall-less Agua Spa. The whispering receptionist was kind enough to take me through the 10,000 square-foot haven of tranquility cocooned in miles of diaphanous white curtains. The soft and warm light contributes to creating a dreamy and almost cloud-like ambiance.
Magnus Long & Michael Ruh at the Conran Shop
The Conran Shop celebrated the London Design Festival by unveiling its Autumn 2014 collection. It features designs and exclusive collaborations, including Magnus Long’s beautifully balanced Stix Dining Table in Marquina Marble and Michael Ruh fabulous
blown glass luminaires.
Gala Fernandez: Out of the Cage
I shot the Out of the Cage show featured by the Marion Friedmann Gallery at the London Cervantes Institute first thing in the morning, and the late summer light was doing a great job at complimenting Gala Fernandez’s incredible glasswork blown into birdcages.
‘the objects are a result of the interaction of the hot fluid glass with the moulds, the final pieces carrying the marks and history of both their former existences,’ Marion Friedmann explained in an interview to Designboom. ‘the project questions the status of confinement versus refuge. a cage can be conceived as imprisonment or a shelter for comfort. the glass works subtly capture this essence of limitation, protection and custody in a very imaginative fashion.’
