Sonia Deleani

A lot of time, few tools, in the heart of my refuge studio in the Drôme Provençale, an ancestral land of potters, a historic haven, with the generous beauty of the surrounding area that shapes my collections throughout the seasons.

From my training at the École Boulle and my extensive experience in design, I retain a demanding approach to form, line, and perfect proportion, a clear function that combines with sensitive emotion and the unpredictable nature of surfaces, accommodating the hand’s hesitation and subsequent gain in confidence. I strive to question and explore the boundaries between design and craft, between art and utility, by proposing organic, sometimes narrative, or more architectural forms that ultimately coalesce through affinity to form a “family.” I like to offer combinations of pieces like a small theater of everyday life, in the way the Japanese honor the “tokonoma.”

I am moved and intrigued by the strength and simplicity of Japanese ceramics.

How can one achieve this balance, this gentle power, without imitating or pretense?

The same intention is applied to small pieces—a symbolic bowl held in the palm of one’s hand, everyday tableware—as well as to larger ones—furniture or sculptures—that seek light and invite touch.

Refining the thicknesses, smoothing them, or, conversely, deliberately giving weight and presence through more radical textures. It is this tension between the rough and the precious, the drawn and the spontaneous, the bare and the glazed, the polished and the rough that I try to evoke and balance. Stoneware, my preferred material, is adorned with glazes of ash, oxides, and, more recently, minerals gathered in nature. Simultaneously, texture impressions taken directly from these same gathering places—trees, stones, plants, or other surprises—become matrices and are recomposed in the studio, like a negative of the landscape, a snapshot of presence.

The “Echo Bark” mobiles emerged from this recent work.