• Brigitte worked as a veterinarian before pursuing ceramics
• She is inspired by altered states of consciousness
• Her work explores the traces of memory and time

Through her ceramic reliquaries, incense burners, vessels or tableware, Brigitte Arbelot seeks to create objects that become part of people’s own rituals. In 2017, she opened her own workshop in Brussels, where she sculpts forms that retain a functional purpose, echoing the ancient relationship between ceramics and use. “I left my career as a veterinarian after I found that working with clay is the best way to connect to my inner self and to the world,” she says. Brigitte’s work explores the porous boundaries between the visible and the invisible, presence and remembrance, function and secrecy. Her dialogue with clay is intuitive and experimental, allowing the material to reveal abstract forms. Brushed on in successive layers, slips and glazes create rough or lustrous surfaces, bubbles, cracks and fleeting traces of colour that resemble geological strata.