Claire Mayet
Claire Mayet, a French ceramist based in Geneva, Switzerland, has made a name for herself with her mastery of misappropriating everyday objects, which she uses to create droll mise-en-scènes or spark unexpected poetic encounters. Her favorite aisle is the DIY store: raw building materials, joists, tiles and pipes give her ideas of circulatory energy and fertile hybridizations. Nor is he unfamiliar with the decoration department, or with the cross-fertilization of know-how. The question of coatings, which hide or protect, transform or deceive, is at the very heart of his practice. In the field of ceramics, the elaboration of glazes - which, once fired, become coatings, ensuring the beauty and solidity of terracotta surfaces - is well-suited to this approach to the notion of metamorphosis, which the artist invokes in all his sculptural productions, scenographies and performances, even those that are (seemingly) far removed from the field of ceramics. Photographs of her research into enamels, for example, gave her the idea of enlarging them to create a flamboyant print on fireproof polyester (a technical material that also speaks of fire). Stage curtains, however, are a far cry from the supple silks of the great interior decorators (didn't the famous designer Peter Marino recently have Jacquard weavings made from enamel enlargements by Dalpayrat - the great Art Nouveau ceramist of whom he is an assiduous collector - for the Italian textile firm Rubelli...). As for Claire Mayet, it's more the concept and idea of the fake, the fictitious, the shock and the knock that prevails, in a desire to transform life into a burlesque theater. Her installations of reconstituted objects, or those strangely married together, most certainly summon up the intersecting universes of the poet Lautréamont and the filmmaker Almodovar. FB
Born in 1979. Lives and works in Geneva.
TRAINING
-2016: DAS Ceramics and Polymers, CERCCO/HEAD, Geneva - 2002: Bachelor of Art and Design
design, ceramic-object orientation, HEAD, Geneva.
EXHIBITIONS
2021 : Third floor chakra, Offhause Museum, Geneva - 2019 : Open to Art ceramic award, Galerie Officine Saffi, Milan (IT) - get a nerve!, Villa Sarasin, Geneva - Fantasy Island, Kunst(Zeug)Haus, Rapperswil-Jona (CH) - 2018 : ... On the beach, Jardin botanique alpin, Meyrin (CH) - 2017 : Miroir céramique, musée de Carouge (CH) - Les archives du feu, LiveinyourHead, HEAD, Geneva.
