Practical Spirit
Daphne Leon, the ceramist who became internationally known for the collaboration with the designer Jacquemus, talks about her art, drawing inspiration from the material she handles and the process of her work: solid and simple.
Portrait: Stefanos Oikonomakis, Text by Xenia Georgiadou
In her preparatory year for university in England and while she had already decided that she would study graphic design, Daphne Leon walked past a room where they were teaching bookbinding. The sight won her over. Ceramics came several years later. “Already from my University years, I was obsessed with clarifying that I am not an artist. I liked folding paper. Even today, working with my hands is for me the most exciting and important part of my work”.
It was her collaboration with Jacquemus for the “Oursin” restaurant in Paris that quickly brought her international publicity, but above all it was an opportunity to discover another – more arty – side of ceramics. “For me, the challenging part of this project was that I had to design the restaurant’s serving dishes. People didn’t know this and the journalists didn’t focus on this. They focused on the ‘sculptural’ plates that complemented the actual dishes on the table”. The inspiration for this series was some of Picasso’s dishes with embossed fish. “If I tried to do the same, it would have just been a bad copy. I never thought of them as decorative plates on a wall. Their place was on a table; they never shed their ‘utilitarian’ role. I can imagine them on a coffee table, along with books. They would not be the centrepiece. They are best brought out through interaction with other objects”.
The chapel plate she made for the shop of the Museum of Cycladic Art was similarly inspired as an indirect reference to the dove plate of the early Cycladic period or the coffee cups with their blush tones. “I take elements from tradition: techniques
or decorative methods, colours. But as an overall approach, I will never touch that part. It’s another world, the traditional; it doesn’t belong in my hands.
Greek traditional pottery is a living tradition, it triumphs. You have to find another way to exist”. I am thinking, as she speaks, that it is difficult to meet such a “solid” personality, earthy, who concentrates on the technical part, defying the artistic
dimension of her works, so interesting that she “mixes” the utilitarian with the decorative and celebrates the “drudgery” of her work. “Have you seen my Instagram
account?” she asks me, interrupting my thoughts. “At first I had terrible qualms about these posts. People see these highly stylized images of super clean porcelain
and are unaware that these objects came out of a messy, muddy, dusty environment. It seems like you’re doing the process an injustice, doesn’t it. That’s why now in the stories I show the whole journey of an object”.
don’t have any pots, but I buy a lot of flowers at the farmers market and that will be my next sculptural project. I’m going to make ceramic vases with calla lilies. My grandmother gave me the idea. Besides, the first ceramic dishes I saw in my life that I admired were at her house”.
