When did you decide to become an artisan?
After high school, I wanted to follow a manual and artistic training. I found an apprenticeship in a semi-industrial ceramics workshop, which gave me my first taste of clay. Then I went to the Academy of Arts and Crafts in Etterbeek, Brussels, from where I graduated in 1980.
What techniques do you master?
Having been an academy teacher for 23 years, I master a number of different techniques. In the past I have used throwing, high temperature glazes and gas reduction cooking. In 2004 I started to work with porcelain paper. I developed a technique for dipping plants in paper clay and assembling them before firing.
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How would you describe your creative process?
It is the process of making my pieces that guides my thoughts about them, leading me along my path as a ceramicist towards the conception of new projects. My way of creating begins with doing, rather than thinking.
And what fuels your imagination?
Vegetal structures, the submarine world, the transformation of natural materials by the elements: wind, rain, water, frost, heat, time... but also more metaphysical issues such as ageing, disappearance, remains, traces, fragility, the disorder that emerges from within apparent order.