ARTIST

Ju Desrumaux

Juliette Desrumaux develops a ceramic practice born from a desire to break away from industrial rhythms and mass-production logic. Her work is rooted in a return to gesture, material, and slow time. Through clay, she explores an intuitive, raw, and essential approach, where creation becomes a space for breathing, silence, and reconnection.

Earth is made to be shaped. Clay is the most manual material, given to us to be modelled.
Pottery has been my passion for more than 25 years.
As a designer in mass retail I was trained to create commerical products for the largest numbers of consumers.
To escape computers, meetings and business I always needed a “clay break” once a year. This activity then became necessary once a week and I felt the urge to practice it daily.
No color, no trend, no pattern, just a deep desire to reconnect with the Earth, touching the clay.
It gave me the opportunity to escape from the frenzy of consumption, Touching the clay is approaching my soul, pausing.
This timelessness, slowness, this inner silence have become necessary to me. Pottery has slowly become a daily activity.
I don’t estimate the time spent on an item, nor its pro tability.
Modelled with the coil-technique, each lamp, each pot takes its shape in an intuitive and spontaneous way.
Eventually, the items get always bigger, heavier and rougher.
When the material has dried enough, I scrape it in order to reveal its mineral quality, simple and essential. A bit of glaze, only if necessary.
Once they are nished, the pieces of pottery interact with each other like the trees in the forest. One year ago, I settled my workshop in the former Clarisse convent in Roubaix, among an eclectic community experimenting alternative and frugal ways of life.

Juliette DESRUMAUX
Designer of unique and raw stoneware objects