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.