Adrien Chevalley

One of Adrien Chevalley’s studio wall is crawling with ceramic life: plants, snakes, birds, worms and crayfish in a bas-relief commissioned by a Swiss museum. There’s something rigid about the composition, an element of control contradicting its fluidity, but the violence it contains reveals itself more readily in a separate set of tall free-standing flowers. Produced in the extruder, equal in diameter, their stems borrow some individuality from small leaves or nodes that make them even more restraint. They are crowned by a single flower or fruit, large and abundant, their freedom in awkward tension with the industrial stems. Capturing the intense unease caused by human domination over nature, Chevalley also suggest a future reconciliation. High against another wall is a large bug, clad in some kind of space suite and helmet. Confusingly, it only becomes a fellow creature when it appears as truly alien – or a saint. Chevalley employed a variety of building techniques while in residence — including extruding, hand and slab-building. Through explorations of EKWC’s glaze library, he became interested in celedon and ash-based glazes and, so, pursued reduction firing. His wall-hanging and floor-sitting sculptures were often assembled from multiple, interlocking and highly detailed parts — and the dolapix slip added to his tile works provided a fluidity and natural-ness to the figures and forms.