about

A short presentation in English

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My work and my approach

ARNAUD ROY

A strong urge to create...

From ever since I can remember, I’ve had a compulsive urge to create. It started with drawing and painting as a young child, and it later evolved into an all-encompassing curiosity with things artistic. As a teenager and a young adult, I tried many kinds of techniques and media: oil and acrylic paintings, calligraphy, paper-making with plants and natural fibers, silk-painting, etc. After three years spent studying art practice and history of arts in my hometown in Normandy, I went to the UK for a year and devoted myself to studying foreign languages (English and modern Greek).

A path made of fired clay...

My encounter with ceramics began in 2014 and marked a decisive turn in my artistic endeavours. By inviting me to play with the endless possibilities of clay, it carved a new path for my creative process. I allowed myself to experiment with matter and shape, modeling and handbuilding black stoneware or paperclay porcelain. I took weekly lessons in the workshop of Sandrine Pagny and Anne-Soline Barbaux in Paris, and then continued in two other workshops, including "Vents & Courbes" where I currently work.

From Normandy to Catalonia, Greece & Japan

Over the past three decades, travel has played an essential part in my development as a person as well as an artist. After a time spent in Paris, away from the shores of the English Channel where I grew up, travelling to the Mediterranean was an epiphany - a personal Grand Tour in a harsh world of rocks and light. Greece is the country where I feel I truly belong, and Catalonia is the place where I've chosen to have a home away from home. To a large extent, I deeply feel that my ceramic pieces are infused with the very essence of the land itself.

Another crucial element to understand my work is my love of Japan and Japanese aesthetics and lifestyle. Since 2008 I have repeatedly traveled to Japan, especially to places like Mashiko, Inbe-Bizen, Arita-yaki and the Saga province, some of the archipelago's most famous pottery hubs. I like to think that my own ceramics are not derivative of what I saw in Japan. I have too much respect forJapanese potters and ceramic artists to believe I can emulate or recreate what they do. But I hope I can establish a meaningful aesthetic conversation between my Western background and these Japanese influences.

“ Sometimes even when I touch things I still dream of an element” Gaston Bachelard, "The Poetics of Space

I started working primarily with black stoneware. I immediately found its dark, raw quality very stimulating. Spontaneously, I began to scrape the surface of my pots and cups with a knife, patiently making tiny ridges and furrows in the clay. This apparently violent gesture proved liberating and soothing at the same time. As I was learning about the various techniques of coil-building, slabbing and throwing, I intuitively came up with this process, which has become almost a signature feature of my work over time. On a very regular basis, I continue to explore with clay what French abstract painter Pierre Soulages called the "secret light coming from black".

I now use other types of clay and techniques, creating a wide range of ornemental vessels and utilitarian pieces. The objects that take shape between my fingers are never quite the same but never completely distinct. I realize now that a steady series of forms have kept recurring over the years, almost unwittingly : strange stranded shells; nest-like vessels with an outer skin looking like scraped bark; womb-like vases or unusual pebbles. In my own way, I try to reconnect with a slowly decaying natural world of corals and mineral, marine life. I like the fact that people who see and touch my ceramic pieces sometimes speculate over what they look like: a fungus, an oyster or a tree branch. I do not believe that ceramicists or sculptors actually give shape to anything new under the sun. Nor do I think that art should strive to imitate nature. Instead I'm convinced that nature's treasure-trove of shapes, colours and visual inventions is already vast enough for us to humbly let it nurture us from within and live inside us.

A glimpse at some of my recent works