Recipe for Failure

Jardin Secret is an exploration of the lines between nature, the body, and the process of making. Marianne L-C’s work investigates ideas of myth-making and their connection to the body. This serves as a parallel to the process of making ceramics, where one is literally using their body to make impressions into the material, which eventually turns into its own story.

This project is a representation of a window in time, pandemic time. For L-C, this was a period “when we were in a process of navigating our relationships with each other. When [she] had deeper connections to landscapes than to other bodies.” The artist uses the landscape of ceramics and the corporeality inherent to the medium as a means to question and submit to narrativity. She approaches her process as a journey of discovery, wherein the artwork is mediated between an idea, her hands, and the kiln. Clay is a material that must be navigated directly with the body and this makes it a rich, mirrored site to explore one’s ideas; L-C’s works are illuminated with questions of relationality, and the direct impressions of her hands reflect her intentions. She enjoys working with her hands, and ceramics allow for a really intimate relationship with the medium. In her words, “There is nothing standing between [me] and the clay. I feel it’s a privilege to be able to be so close to the materials I work with.”

Since starting her first year at Concordia with prior experience in crafts-based pottery, L-C’s process has emphasized the agency of the medium. In ceramics, colour is a means of taking risks, wherein the maker has limited control over the final result. To a certain extent, the materials have their own lives. L-C shares the importance of allowing her pieces to uphold their own agency: “In ceramics, you don’t have full control of how the glaze will behave. They have the right to have their own lives, and their own unique expressions. It feels important and fun to surrender to the limits of the material.”