Alice Aucuit

Alice Aucuit, through her use of clay, questions the function and status of objects, the shifting boundary between contemporary art and craftsmanship, the handmade and the mass-produced. She juggles a colorful and offbeat utilitarian production under the name "O' grés d'Alice" (Alice's Stoneware) with artistic creations that take the form of installations, sculptures, or performances. Alice champions the possibility of combining contemporary artistic approaches with traditional know-how.

The ceramicist explores, in various ways, the relationship between everyday events, current events, and collective or personal memory, the relationship between humans, culture, and objects. She often juxtaposes images from the past, objects, or ancient texts with contemporary situations and modern figures. This often translates into iconographic syncretism, where notions of accumulation, repetition, hybridity, anachronisms, and parody recur in her work. A text or a pun can become the starting point for artistic research, just like a historical fact, a place, or a current event, which she often parallels, blending the sacred and the ordinary, the popular and the precious, the public and the intimate, with humor and sensitivity. "Alice Aucuit was not born in Wonderland, far from it. She doesn't believe in fairy tales; she delves into the folds of history to find those who have been forgotten and bring them to life, whether in stoneware or earthenware. She carries within her "this poetry [...] this atmosphere of dream and magic which, for some imaginations, emerges quite naturally from the very spectacle of reality" (Edmond Jaloux).

A ceramicist, she covers herself in clay in performance (Two Clay, 2010), exhibits bone in her magnificent form ("Bone as the Essence of Man," 2011), climbs the tree of life and plants a slogan: "no future" ("Tree Life," 2013), and heals the wounds of past urban struggles with her doves of peace ("Doves for the Commune," Histoire(s) de rues, 2011).

With her insatiable energy and boundless curiosity, Alice Aucuit reinterprets the art of ceramics to—beyond its primary role of providing a container or decorating a surface—highlight the contents and make the walls speak. The burning, transforming flame becomes her ally in revealing the alchemy of humanity, its historical follies as well as its porcelain joys.

But the artist is above all a woman and, as such, a bearer of the future and heir to the secret memory passed down by word of mouth since the first guardians of the home. When she hangs her repurposed Barbies from the trees ("Strange Fruits in Plainpalais," Histoire(s) de rues 2011"), she stands in solidarity with the victims of patriarchy and the rigidity of monotheism. For them, Alice Aucuit makes glass amulets with enameled souls.

I met the vivacious Alice in Saint-Pierre in the south of Reunion Island in 2011, and over the course of a month, or rather ten hours of interviews, she enthusiastically recounted the adventures her age-old art has taken her on: from the prestigious school of Vevey in Switzerland to the potters of China. Little by little, the abundant collection of his practices, the joyful jumble of forms and unexpected associations took coherence to reveal a committed body of work, full of humor and seriousness.