Céramique à Way's Mills 2025
Expo-Sale
Amélie B. Céramiste explores ceramics with a flexible and multidisciplinary approach, using handbuilding, throwing, and moldmaking to create utilitarian tableware and home decor pieces. Her practice also includes teaching throwing and handbuilding, which helps her develop her skills and pass on her love for the craft. Her work stems from a need to create with her hands and to express the emotions inspired by nature into physical form. A sensibility for touch, materials, and sensory details are at the core of her creations. Committed to environmental sustainability, she actively seeks to reduce her ecological footprint and is currently working on a collection made from recycled clay sourced from her production process.
Fabrica Ateleia is a small-scale brand founded by a single artist. Drawing inspiration from nature, specifically from rivers with smooth pebbles that boast surprising colors, Fabrica Ateleia offers tableware that gives free rein to the customer's imagination. With classic and organic lines and shapes available, along with a wide range of matching glazes, customers can create a completely personalized set that reflects their unique style. The possibilities are endless, allowing for a unique mix-and-match table setting.
Catherine de Abreu is a ceramic artist driven by a deep desire to communicate through her creations. Fueled by a tireless curiosity and constant questioning, her practice is defined by a thoughtful and conscious approach. Her studies at Concordia University, initially in printmaking and painting, continue to influence her current work, particularly through the integration of graphic elements. Catherine creates tableware objects that combine function and artistic expression. Her contemporary works embody her values and a worldview that is both empathetic and assertive. Driven by a growing environmental awareness, she explores deep connections with nature and the environment, while valuing craftsmanship and dialogue with others.
In her work, Célia Widemann seeks to marry beauty and utility, functionality and ornamentation, creating pieces that inspire contemplation. She combines her passions for textiles and ceramics through stenciling, traditional and water-based engraving, and prints inspired by textile printing. Her simple, poetic motifs are set against textured backgrounds in a soft color palette, giving each object a tactile and aesthetic dimension. Her style is inspired by childhood memories, particularly her grandmothers' gardens, which she reinterprets with nostalgia and poetry in her first collection, “Première cueillette” (First Harvest). Each unique piece invites you to “pick” a fragment of this imaginary world to bring beauty to everyday life.
Under the name Pas Mon Style, artist Christina Julien creates utilitarian pieces with an avant-garde and minimalist style. Each piece is hand-thrown in small batches and released in seasonal drops. Working primarily with stoneware, she experiments with different clays and glazes, favoring a black-and-white palette. Pas Mon Style is an ongoing exploration of shapes and how we interact with objects around us. The processes of pottery and life are evoked with rounded forms, spirals at the bottom of pots, and thumbprints on cups. Mugs, bowls, and plates are designed to be mixed and matched to form totally unique collections. The brand's name reflects its playful approach, combining function and fun, inspired by Fluxus philosophy and art. The artist also runs workshops that make ceramics accessible and inspiring to everyone.
Eve m Laliberté explores various techniques, favoring casting and assembling molded pieces to create functional and decorative objects. Her practice also includes teaching, promoting the sharing and revitalization of ceramic arts. In 2023, she turned her attention to unique pieces and installations, exploring themes of roots, belonging, and the environment, particularly the forest. Her artistic identity blends curves, color, and graphic codes drawn from her background in design. She combines rigor and ease, order and chaos, spontaneity and reflection. Inspired by Japanese watercolors, Art Nouveau, industrial design, and the forest, she creates harmonious forms in which the circle plays a central visual role, combining raw materials and organic decoration in a subtle balance.
Evelyne Rivest mainly creates unique pieces or small series in porcelain, mostly utilitarian but highly intricate, using gas or electric kilns. She also practices Raku, more limited in quantity but just as artistic and distinctive. Her craft provides her with a particular intensity, an unpredictable adventure where surprise is always present. Through her meticulous depictions of leaves, flowers, branches, and birds rich in engravings and colors, Evelyne seeks balance and harmony. The fluidity of her movements is the essential source of her creative pleasure, giving life to pieces where detail and emotion combine to delicately capture the beauty of nature.
Fabienne Synnott works with stoneware and porcelain, thrown, handbuilt, or sculpted, into one-off pieces or small series. She mainly uses gas reduction firing, and sometimes wood. She treats each piece as a living composition, where the clay retains its mark. Inspired by nature and the “primitive,” she likes to play with materials and let the material express itself, provoking transmutation through flame. Fabienne combines sculpture, engraving, and painting, seeking a fluid gesture that lets the tool speak for itself. She often throws basic shapes that she transforms or assembles, creating textures and contrasts between glazed surfaces and bare clay. Working as a team with her kiln is to her a dance that brings her pieces to life, true portals to the inner self.
Jennifer Tannahill explores different hand-building and wheel-throwing techniques, pairing them with her cone 6 electric firings. She likes to leave the marks of construction visible, while smoothing out and softening the edges, so they are pleasant to the touch. She strives for an impossible perfection that leads her to work slowly and precisely, creating straight lines and delicate surfaces while embracing the imperfect beauty of the handmade. She especially enjoys making porcelain vases decorated with flowers drawn using an underglaze pencil, which remind her of charcoal drawings on folded paper. Her pieces capture nostalgia and the fleeting nature of life. They juxtapose the permanence of ceramics with the ephemeral nature of flowers, inviting the user to consider the transience of all things.
Joan Scott works with stoneware and porcelain, combining throwing and handbuilding techniques. Her pieces are fired at high temperatures in both electric and wood-fired kilns. Her practice is nourished by peace and nature, which fuel her creative energy. Her practice evolves in cycles of production that alternate between sculpture and utilitarian pieces, often created in solitude over long periods. This need for isolation is counterbalanced by firing the wood kiln with a community of other potters. She appreciates this collective work, which allows her to pursue common goals and enrich her creative process through exchange and mutual support.
A ceramicist for 50 years, José Drouin creates one-off utilitarian and decorative pieces in which fire plays a central role. Working with clay in Mont-Saint-Hilaire using raku techniques and cone 10 gas firing, she enjoys exploring spontaneity and unpredictability in her firings. Her works are born from a balancing act between control and surprise, making each firing unique. Fascinated by the unexpected, she considers every surprise a source of inspiration.
Julie Lavoie's work revolves around the creation of utilitarian objects for tableware and tea sets, primarily wood-fired at high temperatures. This ancestral technique guides her creations, blending tradition and modernity. Julie develops her visual signature through these wood firings, a physically and technically demanding process. She favors natural colors and clean lines, so that the material and firings can speak for themselves. Everyday objects, clay, water, fire, the forest, plants, minerals, and the passage of time are integral elements of her artistic approach.
Justine St-Amour works with clay on the wheel and by hand, juxtaposing raw, textured material with decorations inspired by the natural colors of earth and water. She seeks a calming balance that creates a unique atmosphere. Wheel-thrown pieces are faceted and crackled throughout, while her hand-built pieces are decorated with layered crackled slabs. Some are left smooth to make room for decorations reminiscent of treasure maps. Justine works intuitively, guided by the material, rhythm, and movement. Inspired by music and nature, she seeks to convey emotion through texture and rich decorations, and values the imprint of the hand, thus creating perfect imperfection.
Lucie Bories crafts pots inspired by the shapes of the fruits and vegetables she harvests and eats. Each season, she selects edible plants that become ephemeral molds for her pieces: peppers, squash, and celery are transformed into cups, bowls, plates, and salad bowls. The container takes its shape from its contents, striking a dialogue between what nourishes and what contains. The pieces are left bare on the outside, polished with stone, and partially glazed on the inside, highlighting the texture of the clay. Inspired by slow movement and respect for living things, Lucie seeks to pay tribute to the work of farm workers and emphasize the importance of our connection to the earth that nourishes us.
Since childhood, clay has been Marie Serreau's medium of choice. In 2000, she rediscovered clay in Montreal and in 2002, trained as a ceramicist at the Institut européen des arts céramiques in France. After completing her studies, she traveled and collaborated with ceramicists in several countries, thereby enriching her artistic vision. Based between France and Quebec, she specializes in earthenware, which she appreciates for its flexibility, color, and history. Marie skillfully throws her pieces for comfort on the lips and lets herself be guided spontaneously by the brush, painting with blue or black slip before engraving to refine the design of a piece. Each item is unique while belonging to the same family. She also creates small sculptures that tell stories inspired by folktales and childhood memories.
In her Sutton studio, Marie-France Labrosse works with porcelain and stoneware, primarily on the potter's wheel. Her glazing technique, inspired by watercolour painting, allows her to create soft, shifting colour effects. Her pieces are fired in an electric kiln at cone 6. Inspired by nature and the search for balance between opposites, she plays with the contrasts between stability and movement. Her creations possess a structural strength that recalls the fragility of the earth. In each of her pieces, she seeks to capture this delicate tension, where softness and solidity coexist.
Meriel Bond creates functional, wheel-thrown pieces embellished with hand-built details such as handles and decorations. She devotes considerable time to carving and glazing to develop highly unique designs. Her preferred techniques include sgraffito, mishima, wax resist, and burnishing. She works primarily with porcelain and speckled stoneware that she fires to cone 6. Based in a small shared studio in Montreal, she does her firing and glazing in a local community studio. Her work is inspired by Scandinavian design and mid-20th-century modern kitchenware, blending vintage and contemporary styles. Her designs draw on her nostalgia for the people and places dearest to her. Her goal is to create beautiful, memorable collections of work that are still practical in the home.
In her practice, Michèle Lavallée expresses her sensitivity and love for nature, finding balance and motivation in creation and experimentation. Always seeking to progress, she has created a collection of translucent clay candle holders, each slightly different in both shape and pattern, inviting reflection and shared moments. She also creates pieces with more organic shapes, decorated with floral patterns using a screen printing technique. The artisan enjoys alternating between techniques and clays: working on the potter's wheel brings her a sense of calm meditation, while hand-building immerses her in total absorption. Whatever the method, she ensures that her creations are ergonomic, aesthetic, and practical. For her, creating is a vital act, a positive gesture that nourishes her balance and motivation, a privileged way of “being” in the world and bringing beauty into her life and the lives of others.
For Nadi artiste céramiste, walking by the sea or in the forest brings feelings of well-being and fulfillment. Through her creations that accompany daily rituals, she tries to bring us back to the present moment, as do the texture of a pebble or the softness of the inside of a shell. She communicates her love for nature in her creation of ceramic objects made from natural stoneware. The shapes are round, soft, comforting, and inviting to the touch. She uses several techniques, including throwing, molding, and hand-building.
Noémie Bombardier works mainly with throwing and hand-building, occasionally exploring molding. She creates pieces that encourage relaxation and connection with nature, warm and comfortable pieces that you want to hold and feel. Her approach aims to spark interest on several levels: through form, texture, and visual appeal.
Patrick Duclos combines classic and modern, glossy and matte, using different levels of contrast to transform a functional piece into a work of art. Inspired by the textures produced by his handcrafted tools, he enhances his pieces with random patterns. After an initial firing, he adds glossy glazes made from raw materials. Driven by a deep drive to create, he offers an alternative to mass production and invites people to create their own rituals. His pieces, combining ancient practices and modern tools, reflect the contrasts present in his way of being.
Roxane Charest's studio is based in Montreal's Faubourgs neighborhood and offers minimalist, organic pieces. Dark, raw stoneware evokes an introspective, gentle, and serene universe. Created in 2019 and constantly evolving, the Méandres collection evokes flexibility, freedom, and slowness. A fluid line runs through her pieces, tracing the outline of a plate, the rim of a bowl, the lip of a cup. Each piece is thrown by hand on a potter's wheel or cut from a slab of clay and entirely hand-built. The glazes, meticulously applied to each piece, create plays of transparency and variations that reveal depth in the different colors and a unique signature for each piece.
Roxanne Gagné (Roga)'s practice is greatly inspired by the territory and landscapes of Quebec. She is guided in particular by the textures, colors, and shapes she observes in nature. Her pieces are a poetic and abstract interpretation of the spaces that inhabit her. Roxanne is interested in the unpredictability, uniqueness, and nuances that the ceramic medium confers. Each piece is imbued with the spontaneity of gesture and movement. “My background in tourism and sustainable development enriches and colors my reflections and creative process. The land and its traces are at the heart of my concerns and inspirations. These landscapes that inhabit me leave a mark on my geopoetic creations. With simplicity and harmony, I try to express beauty.”
coa coa ceramics handbuilds pieces, drawing inspiration from the contemporary Japanese technique of nerikomi and traditional methods used to shape Chinese Zisha Yixing teapots. Its meticulous process involves calculating, coloring, mixing, rolling, cutting, and layering clay to create intricate patterns. A slab of these patterns is then sliced, flattened, pressed, and bonded to achieve the desired shape. The artist is interested in translating his work as a graphic designer and animator into his ceramic work. His graphic patterns are designed to break the stability of the clay by suggesting movement. He watches them come to life as he shapes them into simple forms. His patterns thus gain a new dimension and become objects in their own right.
Shawna Cooper (Arcana Clay) was raised in Toronto, where she studied printmaking and painting at the Ontario College of Art. The path to ceramics traversed many other media. Initially working on paper and canvas, she then took her paper work onto textiles, first onto quilts. Shawna spent many years working on the design and print of garments and fabric, including designing and creating merchandise for bands and music festivals. In 2020, ceramics captivated her. Now based in a collective studio in Montreal, Shawna applies design principles to her hand-painted surfaces and experiments with a variety of surface techniques on clay. Inspired by the endless possibilities of clay, she creates utilitarian pieces that amplify everyday gestures and convey a touch of playfulness and delight.
Marie-Ange Samon has been a ceramist for 30 years, using an ancestral technique that she has refined over time in a contemporary direction. Her inspiration comes from her roots, universal sacred memory, and her love of animals. Her work involves handbuilding from coils and porcelain slabs.
Véronique Allaman of Kaoline Atelier works with translucent porcelain which she combines with earthenware to create unique landscapes that are only revealed during the final firing. The patterns then appear, ranging in color from pure white to warm brown, in a transformation full of serendipity and surprises. Her simple, refined shapes serve as a canvas for the decorations, while the sanded exteriors highlight the natural softness of the clays used. Trained at the Centre de Céramique Bonsecours, she discovered a free and creative style in sculpture, which still nourishes her approach today. Handbuilding allows her to work gently, leaving a part of her sensitivity in each piece. The marriage of cold, precious porcelain and warm earthenware illustrates a poetry of opposites through a minimalist and timeless tableware collection.
Sophie Cousineau of ceramik FiSo kuzinö mainly uses wheel-throwing, while incorporating hand-building and molding to enrich her collections. Passionate about glazes, she experiments with decorations and enamels to create functional and decorative objects that combine durability and versatility. Her work plays on visual and tactile contrasts, juxtaposing matte enamels and bare clay, bright colors and natural tones. Her Point à la ligne collection is inspired by primary colors and geometric minimalism, evoking a return to her early passion for drawing. Driven by an eco-friendly approach, she optimizes her resources and recycles her waste to design unique, functional, and environmentally conscious pieces. Sophie also draws inspiration from Bauhaus and artists such as Kandinsky to create a balance between aesthetics and functionality.
ce jardin qui m'habite
Outdoor exhibition
Held in the context of Céramique à Way's Mills
From June 21st to July 1st 2025, 10 AM to 6 PM
Vernissage: June 20th 2025, 5 PM to 7 PM
Rozynski Art Centre
2133, chemin de Way's Mills
Barnston-Ouest (Québec) J0B 1C0
Présentée dans le cadre de l'expo-vente Céramique à Way’s Mills, l'exposition collective à ciel ouvert « ce jardin qui m'habite » prend racine derrière le Centre d’art Rozynski.
Le long des sentiers, des œuvres évoquent les cycles du vivant, la décomposition et la renaissance. Certaines se concentrent sur ce qui grouille à la surface, sur les interactions souterraines et la régénération des sols ; d’autres prolongent le paysage jusque dans la rivière. Des œuvres de cabanes et de bassins révèlent les architectures du jardin. Elles tournent notre attention vers les oiseaux qui s’y pavanent et les grenouilles qui y coassent, vers les pierres qui s’y cachent et les secrets qu’elles recèlent.
À fleur de terre, le jardin se fait monde.
Photo : Noémie Sylvestre
Photo : Noémie Sylvestre
Photo : Noémie Sylvestre
Photo : Noémie Sylvestre
Artists
Maude Arès
Richard Ighby & Marilou Lemmens
Julie Lavoie
Annie France Leclerc
Clara Lou Micheau
Amélie Proulx
Curator
Noémie Fortin is originally from Lac-Mégantic. She lives with her family in the Eastern Townships, on the traditional and unceded territory of the W8banaki Nation, the Ndakina. There, she accompanies artistic, agricultural and community initiatives focused on caring for the living. Attuned to practices grounded in ecofeminist thinking, her research focuses on ecological art that moves outside of institutions to engage with territories and communities, particularly in rural areas.
