Meeting with Emmanuelle Roule
Brutal went to meet Emmanuelle Roule in her studio in the heart of Paris.
During our meeting, she tells us about her journey. Graduated in 2007 from the National School of Applied Arts and Crafts in Paris (Olivier de Serres), Emmanuelle is a graphic designer, freelance artistic director and ceramist. She has also been teaching graphic design since 2016 at the HEAD Haute École d'Art et de Design in Geneva (Switzerland). Complementary to her job as a graphic designer and artistic director focused on commissions in the field of publishing, institutions, gastronomy and culture, she decided to develop since 2012 as a ceramist, a work of experimentation artistic interactions between form, color, light and earth. In 2017, she co-founded with three other ceramic artists, the gangster collective based in the Bastille district of Paris.
She notes her ideas and the first drafts of form in her sketchbook. The basic shape will evolve over the process. Sensitive to words, Emmanuelle builds her universe around construction, sculpture, buildings... The process is often long: there is the elaboration of the theoretical form then the modeling of the form with the earth. Emmanuelle comes to sculpt, stretch, deform the earth. Then, after a drying time, she will take her tools to come and refine the shape, cut, create other sides to the shape...Emmanuelle's hand and tools against the material which is gradually being defined.
In ceramics, she also questions the duality of earth and heat. When it comes to cooking and the heating up of the oven, Emmanuelle speaks of this part as that of: "letting go, which cultivates the unexpected and the surprise, namely cooking, the moment when you abandon your pieces to the heat in the darkness of the oven." It is only several long hours later that we will be able to discover the result.
