What is made slowly, lasts.
It is the phrase I repeat to myself in the workshop. It is not entirely true, and that is exactly why it interests me.
Two workshops
From Monday to Friday, I design software systems: cloud architectures, digital transformations (LinkedIn). Things built to reproduce themselves identically, a thousand times over, without deviation. It is my profession, and I love it for that: the rigour, the precision, the systems that hold.
The rest of the time, I throw stoneware. And there I look for precisely the opposite: objects whose value lies in the fact that no two are quite alike.
I did not leave one for the other. I do both, at the same time, and I do not believe it is a contradiction. Both ask the same things of me: method, patience, a willingness to start again. Only the purpose differs. On one side, erase the variation. On the other, let it live.
It is in that gap that I found stoneware.
In practice, it took years to happen. I had wanted to try for a long time and had never walked into a workshop. It was at a craft fair that I saw Didier Descamps's pieces — a potter in Lambersart. I found them beautiful and I stayed at his stand. My wife took his card, and surprised me with a workshop for two, for our tenth wedding anniversary. She sews; she did not carry on with clay. I never stopped.
What kept me was the way he teaches. Didier taught at the Arts et Métiers engineering school, and he explains the wheel in terms of technique — no magic, no vocabulary of inspiration. I did not have to leave my own profession at the door to step into his, and that is probably why I stayed. The rest followed on its own: two hours with your hands busy, and no room left for anything else.
That first piece still exists. It is flawed — not uneven, flawed — and I keep it: it is useful to have the difference in front of me.
The gesture
The wheel sets its own tempo. Clay does not move faster because you are in a hurry, and it does not forgive distraction. Every form demands time, attention and control — then, at a certain point, demands that you let go.
My approach is centred on simplicity of form and attention to use. Throwing became my language: each piece is born of a repeated, almost mechanical gesture, right up to the moment it stops being one.
In every piece there is a point where pressing further does damage. Recognising that point is what took me longest to learn. It is also the one thing my other profession never taught me.
Material and fire
I work mainly with stoneware from Saint-Amand-en-Puisaye, a dense, robust and living clay. It reacts, expresses itself, sometimes resists — and it is in that dialogue that I find my place. Alongside it, a white stoneware from Raoult & Beck, which I take pyrite-speckled when I want the clay to show, and smooth when I want it to leave the glaze all the room.
Every piece goes through the same stages: throwing, trimming, drying, bisque firing, glazing, then high-temperature firing. I fire mainly in an electric kiln, in oxidation, though a gas firing can still come and challenge my work: two fires, two palettes.
The kiln is the one place where I can do nothing at all. You load what you have made; you unload what the fire has made. Glazes pull back on the edges, run here and not there, shift from one firing to the next. I do not try to correct that.
What remains
A piece does not stop when it leaves the kiln. The foot wears against the table, the surface softens with handling, and the object ends up carrying the marks of what has been done with it. A bowl used every day no longer quite resembles, after a few years, the one that came out of the firing.
This is not wear and tear. It is the rest of the work — and it is no longer me doing it.
That is where my two trades really part ways. During the week, I build things that can be restored, redeployed, rolled back, put back exactly as they were as often as you like. Here, nothing can be replayed: every mark is final, and a piece ends up resembling no one but the person who uses it.
So yes — what is made slowly, lasts. But nothing stays quite identical, and that is precisely what makes an object alive.