About KDF Ceramics and Sculpture

A Journey into Passion

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I was born in Belgium and spent my childhood all over the world with my parents and 4 brothers and sisters. A childhood into different cultures feeding my brain with colours and images that certainly inspired my work.

I first stepped into ceramics when I was 18 years since then,   there, deep in my head is clay, shapes, colours until one day I decided it was time to just drop everything and listen to the call.

I have now enjoyed working on clay for about 14 years and nothing can stop me.

When I arrived in Dubai in 2014, I started working at Diac then I discovered Yadawei Pottery Studio a brand new studio in Al Quoz, And since September 2019 I work at Al Jalila Cultural Center for Children where I found a new dynamic.

My Relation to Clay

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My relation with clay is full of tenderness, clay gives me everything.

Clay is a sensual material soft in appearance but so strong actually. 

Clay teaches you patience, humility, tolerance, a sense of readaptation.   To be able to get what you want from your loaf of clay , you need to be inventive, gentle, tricky, subtil, firm…. Everything at the same time. 

What I most like about working with  clay is that it lets you make mistakes, it lets you reshape your piece  as long as you feed it with some water.  It is only when you are satisfied with the shape you made that you let her dry, and at this point, she will not forgive you if you touch her any more.

My Work

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My work has been guided all along with African accents.  Why? I think once you have set foot on that continent, your mind never looks at things in the same way. 

The first distinctive mark is the turban. Long,  slim, elegant ladies, maybe Masai, maybe Ethiopians who knows

I recently moved away from my filiform ladies for something more contemporary,  more spheric but still with this african touch.

Creativity

Creativity happens when you are in need to build something and you can’t buy it.  Children are creative because they can’t have it all to fulfill their play time. Adults are creative when something is missing and they need to accomplish what was planned at any cost.  

When people say they are not creative, I don’t believe it.  Everyone has been at least once in this situation where you need to create in order to reach what you want if you can’t buy it or have it made.  And yes, the best way to prove to someone that they are creative is to set them in front of a loaf of clay, they will automatically, without any instruction, make a ball first, then dig into it and progressively shape something either useful or nice to look at.  The good thing about clay is that it is tolerant, flexible, it accepts any shape, any creation.

Ceramics Studios and Community

A Studio is a great place to work for many different reasons but first of all and it matches the needs of artists:

For beginners, they can find the necessary assistance to get started and once they are on the  track, they can learn from the more advanced ones and at their own pace, they can progress and help the newcomers which is the best way  to gain confidence very quickly.

For intermediates, even if they  can work alone, even if they do not need as much assistance, they constantly learn new techniques from the other artists. They could just sit there and watch the others work, by the end of the day they know so much more.

For confirmed clay players, this place is the place to be: beyond the quality of the facilities, you find an endless way to exchange with people having the same passion as you, you still discover new things about clay behaviour, about firing temperatures, about glazes…

As in many other art disciplines, ceramics is an endless field of possibilities to learn new techniques, new little tricks to ease your skills, a history going back to the origin of humanity, a collection of ceramics all over the world, in a word, an endless source to feed my passion for Pottery and Ceramics