GOLDEN TOUCH Gilded ceramics from a cultured Parisian potter
‘Pottery is more than a job for me: it is Promethean.’ So says the French ceramicist Karen Swami, who had stints in finance and film production – keeping a potter’s wheel in her office all the while – before deciding to work with clay full-time in 2013. Since then, she has exhibited in the Grand Palais, collaborated with Dior and opened an eponymous atelier next to the Giacometti Institute in Paris’ 14th arrondissement. Today, Swami focuses on throwing oval vessels in pure white porcelain and black or red stoneware. Not afraid to experiment, she finishes some of her designs with a single, sleek glaze, and puts others through multiple firings, peeling off scorched fragments to create an organic pattern and filling the final cracks with lacquer, pewter and gold. Swami is inspired by the British ceramicists Magdalene Odundo and Lucie Rie, but also embraces the Japanese art of kintsugi: gluing together broken shards of china with gold. ‘At the beginning, the technique was an answer to a problem – pure opportunism,’ she says. ‘But now, I like it because it brings a certain integrity, and it shows the fragility of a piece.’ cb Karen Swami (www.swami.fr).