First presented in 2013 at the gallery alongside Alistair Danhieux, the French ceramic artist returns for a solo show that is testament to a subsequent seamless progress, where she subtly combines vessels with writing.
Born in 1980, Océane Madelaine studied literature before discovering ceramics while on a trip to Morocco. Upon her return to France, she decided to train at the CNIFOP in St-Amand-en-Puisaye (Nièvre), then at Maison de la Céramique in Dieulefit (Drôme). She also broadened her path by taking a training course at Éric Astoul’s in La Borne (Cher).
Océane Madelaine set up her first studio in 2010 in the Corbières Massif, amid the French South Eastern garrigue scrubland. There she simultaneously pursued the two inseparable activities that delineate her creative journey – writing and ceramics. She developed a work made of stoneware and porcelain paper clay that she engraves and decorates with engobes and oxides, favouring certain forms such as the bowls and bottles shown here. Cy Twombly’s abstract expressionism as well as more graphic works such as Pierrette Bloch’s have influenced her approach of lines and colours. Each pot thus becomes a wall on which to capture and surreptitiously inscribe traces such as a shaky line, a watercolour blot, a fragment of writing or landscape – each a memory of a presence retained and rendered in the material.