The limits of our perspectives on what an art work should be is often limited by its medium. Alice Zerini-Le Reste, a Montreal-based ceramics artist, aims to expand our definitions of her chosen material through her practice. “Ceramics are not really on the scene,” she says. “When I tell people I’m doing ceramics, they’re like, ‘are you doing pottery?’ I’m like no, it’s sculpture!”
In late September, I got to see Alice’s contributions to the Concordia Ceramics Student Association’s exhibit TRANSFERENCE at Galerie 1040. Here, she offered up novel pieces that challenge the conceptions of how ceramics are created and displayed. Mounted to the gallery's brick wall were Alice’s Rétroviseurs à dessin, a series of waster slabs carved with sketches of buildings from around Montreal.
Waster slabs are the pieces of clay used during firing to prevent glazes overflowing and protect the kiln equipment. Instead of throwing out the slabs which bear the echoes of past projects, Alice gives them a new life and purpose. Additionally, she outfitted the slabs with nuts, bolts, and ceramic brackets, allowing the pieces to do what ceramics often can’t: move.
Rétroviseurs à dessin represents the principles of her practice. “Everything is a test,” she explained, telling me how she loves the scientific side of the medium, the “never-ending exploration of techniques.” She is also drawn to the community and the closeness that working with clay can provide: “When I first started ceramics, it was moving and impressive for me to realize that we could see, through everyone works, the way they actually touch. This is so beautiful! It’s impossible to reproduce somebody else's work because we are not touching the same way.” she said.
Alice likes to create objects which questions and blends the utilitarian with the nonfunctional” but which are also “simple and elegant.” She takes inspiration from her surroundings, like local machinery and buildings, then sees how she can deconstruct and reinterpret these everyday objects through ceramics.
Alice likes to let her curiosity lead her when she is working on projects. She said, “I do a lot of research online and in archives, but I’m mostly working very intuitively. There’s the subject, and the way I’m going to make it. So, first, I’m always looking at one of the two and how they might make sense together.” She likes to play with the fragility of ceramics by merging them with mechanical elements as with the Rétroviseurs à dessin.
However, her current project, recreating a car using ceramics, takes this tension to another level. “I wanted to do the biggest thing I could do. The most mechanical thing we know is the car. Cars are so weird, and they move in such a funny way,” Alice told me. She is also interested in exploring the role cars play in our lives, saying that they are “a specific space in itself, an in-between shelter blending mobility and motionlessness together, but they are moving. It's an ephemeral space but it's also intimate, and linked to our memories of never-ending road trips, deep conversations, loud music and horizon flowing out the window…”
Making a full-size ceramic car is not an easy task: “There's a lot of rules to follow in ceramics so that the piece doesn't break, but I don't like to follow them. I'm just building really intuitively. And sometimes, it's not the way it's supposed to be made, but sometimes it works, sometimes it cracks, it doesn't really bother me.” Her most recent show was until the 18th of december at Projet Casa, where her ceramic car was presented.
It’s easy to be in awe of Alice’s pieces. In early October, she graciously gave me a tour of her home studio where I got to see some of her experiments with different clays, carvings, pigments, and techniques. Her intuitive and investigational practice is what makes Alice’s ceramic work standout. She made it clear that her work is not political or sentimental, but it's about “playfulness, and dangerousness, and taking risks, and how we can just play with forms ...and bring a material like ceramics where it's not supposed to be.”
Alice’s future in ceramics is bright and buoyed by her commitment to the community. “Looking ahead, she hopes to develop a studio with a storefront, fulfilling her dream of creating “the perfect space to do ceramics, to have exhibits and a ceramic collection, just to really enhance the ceramics scene in Montreal… And I want this place to be a place for sculptural and contemporary ceramics, to show that this medium is more than just for mosaics or pottery.” Until then, to witness Alice’s vision, you can see her offerings during the Undergraduate Student Exhibition at Concordia’s FOFA gallery in early 2022.
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