Of Ice and Fire: An Artist’s Trajectory

Laurence Tellier’s modeled-clay sculptures reveal the roots of her inspiration.

Child of the Alps, she grew up surrounded by the exhilarating chaos of the summits – snowfields and ski slopes as playground. Her series Mountain Panoramas, celebrates the particularity of beloved peaks as portraits of renowned landscapes in porcelain.

Ms Tellier’s series Fashion Show, forcefully co-opts the exploitation and sensual extravaganza of the catwalk.

Her fusiform models sashay boldly from vertical planes into the third dimension – a full frontal challenge to the viewer. These freeze-frames of clay in motion bear the fiery stigmata of raku enameling, evoking the artist’s background in the heated struggles of the feminist and gender-equality movements, presenting the human form as graceful androgyny. 

In parallel, her use of kintsugi, a repair technique, highlights the natural breakage in the fired clay – reflections of her formative confrontations in the seventies – to transform the fractures of fate into golden traces of each piece’s history in the flames, mirroring her own militancy.

In expressing her commitment, her work leverages seduction rather than protest, abandons rage for elegance.