Born in 1951 in Paris, the same year that her parents, Jean and Norbert Pierlot, potters, moved to Château de Ratilly, in the Yonne, where she spent her childhood, learning pottery with her parents and the different potters who came to Ratilly to teach.

In 1972 after having obtained a degree in Psychology from Paris, she started a Masters on therapy through manual art whilst also creating with friends a workshop of plastic expression.

Nathalie Pierlot returned to Puisaye in 1977 to devote herself entirely to pottery.  She took over the Ratilly Stoneware business and at the same time developed her own research.

Discrete, secret even, focused, Nathalie Pierlot, girl of stoneware, grew up in the stoneware region, and has remained unfailingly faithful to stoneware.    Her vases, her trays ..we have the strong feeling that they come from someone but also from somewhere, they convey something real, they are not merely impersonal aesthetic objects.  The earth is there, apparent or discreetly under-stated, often coarse, austere, sought-after, in deliberate contrast with the thick dark glaze rich yet it too austere; or else in lighter colours of brown or ocher. Energetic graphic symbols streak the lighter surfaces or those surfaces that have been left free of the heavy thick glaze: thorn scratches on the calves of children taking flight in the sunken lanes or else softer, lithe symbols of writing forms or of primitive magic at the bottom of forgotten woods.
Marcel Poulet, May 2008.