Stéphanie Durand

Tribute to Stéphanie Durand

June 8 - July 4, 2013

Stéphanie Durand. Nautile, 2011. H. 21 x 35 cm

Stéphanie Durand's production reflects her desire to highlight life, its vibrant side, its evolution, its balance. Her pieces have multiple stories, and each one tells its own. Stéphanie sees her profession as a quest for meaning, a way of growing, of getting to know oneself, of shaping one's thoughts, a support for finding oneself and resonating with others. Stéphanie was also a committed person, a mentor to students in the training program, a host workshop, she worked hard to share her know-how.
Nadège Locatelli

Stéphanie Durand passed away on January 18, 2012. She opened her workshop on 1^er April 2005: in just seven years, she has built up a body of work[...].
[...]Stéphanie Durand's pieces, made from rough, highly chamotte-tempered clay, evoke ancient civilizations - prehistoric, Japanese, African, primitive or rather timeless - but at the same time, these pieces, formed on the wheel, are then reworked, at the same time, these pieces, formed on the lathe, are then taken up, deformed and pushed back from the inside by the artist's hand, so as to bring out of the earth an external, almost natural decor of cracks and fissures organized in striations or ribs, in parallel, transverse or oblique beads, according to inspiration. Here, formal modernity is superimposed on the initial primitivism, and sometimes comes very close to the freest contemporary sculpture. And the decor that takes its place here, born of the artist's struggle with her land, displays an astonishing vitality. Stéphanie Durand's world is a world in tune with the very gesture of her artistic creation, that of the inner push. It's a world of continuous growth, of natural, organic, telluric gestation, in the same way as that which presides over the development of coral or shellfish, from pods and gourds to burst seeds. It's a natural world...
jean-François Juillard
University Professor. Extract from the catalog Stéphanie Durand, une vie.