Les petites cheminées Candleholder
by Solenne Belloir · Paris, France

Solenne Belloir is a ceramic artist with a sensitive universe who designs objects that play with their primary function. Her works, oscillating between sculpture and design, have soft and sensual forms whose beauty questions the link between essence and appearance, colour and allure, structure and purpose. They do not call for a single use, but rather a dialogue with interiors, the possibility of perpetual reinvention. Thus the vases let the flowers dance around them, while the curves of her baskets invite to empty them as much as to fill them. Her own way of reconciling nature with emptiness, while preserving its characteristic beauty and liveliness. Solenne Belloir considers technique as a means to achieve dreamed forms. More than a goal, it is a means to their materialisation, a part of the process in the same way as the choice of colours. Her pieces always start from a sketch phase, either pencilled or mental, which guides the artist in her choice of processes. Attracted by the constructive aspect of clay coils, she does not hesitate to abandon it in favour of the wheel or the plate to create the vases, baskets and sculptures that grow at the rhythm of the wild grass in her imagination. In this way, she succeeds in adorning the objects with an extraordinary lightness, using a vocabulary that one would think was borrowed from ballet. Through it, Solenne reminds us that the pleasure taken in creating fully participates in the charm of objects.