She sent everything flying: the thick files, the closely scrutinized finances, the tough negotiations and arbitrations of the world of cinema. Karen Swami, 53, embraced a career in artistic crafts in 2014. In ten years, her rise has been meteoric.
Today, his ceramics adorn the most beautiful palaces, the showrooms of major design and fashion houses and collectors’ salons.
A refuge in Brittany
She makes her pieces at the back of her Parisian boutique. Or, here, in the workshop of his Breton penty in Locquirec, east of the bay of Morlaix (Finistère).
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That morning, the sun’s rays managed to slip through two downpours in Finistère. Installed facing the window of this old farmhouse, the potter’s wheel is bathed in natural light.
Karen Swami works on a Japanese tableware set for star chef Yannick Alléno. The ceramist, elegant and talkative, immediately puts you at ease. But once at work, she is silent and focused. In his hands, a cup takes shape, rises, refines. Matter comes to life.
Intuition and the rough
Her ” thing “, these are rather the pieces that are a bit more monumental. She also likes ” the side rough (rough) “, she said in English. Like his series Tuareg : vases black as coal, with a grainy appearance, topped with a draped effect. Or “the violence of smoke” who “burns hair, eyebrows”.
Obsessed with the cracked desert floor of a still from the film Lawrence of Arabiashe passes “six months developing recipes” to reproduce this effect. She is a real “workaholic”a work addict.
“In the way I work, she says, I have a craft side: a drawing exists or I reproduce pieces that I have already made. And then, there is the one that I prefer: a part where I let myself be guided by an intuition. »
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Early life to privatize East Germany
Yet, ” at the beginning of [sa] life “, despite a photographer father and a gallery owner mother…“scared…
