The quiet language of clay
- Coralie is a former linguistics professor who turned to ceramics after illness
- She embeds natural traces such as leaves, stones and carved stamps in her pieces
- For her, beauty and harmony are essential forces for well-being
A childhood spent collecting clay with her sisters laid the foundations for Coralie Huckel’s second career as a maker. While working in academia, health challenges prompted her to enrol in a throwing class with a Montreal ceramicist in 2012. Ten years later, Coralie left her job to devote herself fully to the studio. Her practice is driven by a search for freedom, harmony and beauty, and a desire to transmit emotion through touch and sight. Coralie presses stones, leaves, flowers and carved stamps into the surface of her forms, seeing clay as a medium that can carry traces of nature and inner life. “Beauty is fundamental to our well-being. I want my pieces to help people reconnect with their own sense of wonder,” she says.
Interview
- What does freedom mean to you?
- Freedom is both creative and existential. It is the decision to swap a secure university career for a studio. I start the day kneading a ball of porcelain and see what wants to emerge. It allows me to reach something deep inside, that fragment of beauty or purity I believe each of us carries.
- Why are porcelain and stoneware so central to your practice?
- Porcelain brings out everything that is fragile and luminous. It allows me to go very deep within myself. I press objects from nature in stoneware, like leaves, flowers, stones, shells and walnut shells, and I also use carved stamps. I see a link between the traces of writing, the traces in the landscape and the traces we leave in clay.
- How do your pieces convey emotions?
- Stamping natural objects gives the piece an energy. It keeps the clay alive, and it is a way of letting nature literally penetrate the clay. My aim is that the person who lives with the piece can sense, through touch and sight, some echo of what I felt when I formed it.
- As a woman, how do you see your mission today?
- Women spend decades caring for others and following roles prescribed by society. At some point we have to reclaim time for ourselves. I aim to marry inner truth and the natural world in objects that encourage people to slow down, feel and remember the child they once were.
Coralie Huckel is an expert artisan: she began her career in 2013
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Coralie Huckel
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