Like many people I didn’t know a thing about ceramics until I reached an advanced age. Clay used to be nothing more than that mud sticking to our shoes, dirtying the bottom of our trousers, filling the mudguards of our bikes and slowing us down on our jaunts across the countryside after the rain. Tableware was tableware, making noise when breaking, which caused stormy reactions amongst adults.
Much later I learnt what that tableware was made of. Not the one made with these special glasses, very solid and handy and quite cheap which was used on the table of the 1960’s modern family, but the one of which the old-fashioned décorations were somewhat altered here and there by blackened lines or nicks, tokens of their owners’good use or clumsyness. I also learnt that clay wasn’t only used to make tableware.
Except for my first splashings in mud as a kid in the Ile de France region I had my first experiences of ceramics in the north of France at the end of the seventies. Then from the Academy of Fine Arts of Dunkerque in 1982-83 I went to study at the Fine Arts School of Mâcon from 1983 to 1986, and there I set up my workshop in a little village nearby Cluny.