What Drew 5 Artists to Vallauris in the South of France?
An ambitious residency in Vallauris, a center for ceramics since the 15th century, hosts about five artists monthly, close to sixty a year. The town is rustic and working class—an artist and artisan-friendly microcosm on the French Riviera. “Ceramic pieces from Vallauris are famed around the country, from restaurants in Cannes to Paris,” Lesley Bodzy tells me. She is one of the five current residents at AIR Vallauris, a sculptor based between New York and Houston. Although she has dabbled in ceramics—she revisited the material by taking a class in Houston earlier this year, but when she realized she would not be able to learn enough to experiment she decided to spend her residency painting. Otherwise, Bodzy’s sculpts in resin, balloons, metals, acrylic paint-pours, and foam with a heavy focus on material experimentation within feminist thematics. For this cycle, Bodzy and another U.S. American, Katie Pfeiffer, share a studio on the second floor, away from the kilns in the basement, where they both paint.
Pfeiffer went back to basics working on observational sketches in France: “The journal part of my sketchbook of my day-to-day experiences at the residency will be the basis of my next series of paintings when I return to Philadelphia,” Pfeiffer wrote to me in an email. Her paintings have naive elements that resemble outsider art—” I feel when one is fused on the inside and has clarity (mentally, emotionally, physically) reaching for a higher state of consciousness becomes easier,” she says about her piece Gamma in which she has depicted the brainwave of bliss. Pfeiffer has been on AIR Vallauris mailing list for fifteen years, finally attending was an important milestone. The residency’s founder, Dale Doron, also a ceramicist, arrived in Vallauris some 20 years ago from Canada and seems to have found his Gamma by running the residency which has accepted more than 450 artists since its founding in 2001.
Vallauris is the home of Madura, the famed ceramic workshop where Picasso made his ceramics with its owners Suzanne and Georges Ramie. Over some 25 years, he created original and editioned vessels, bowls, and plaques in the thousands. Although there is a Picasso museum in Antibes, Vallauris is home to the largest holding of his ceramics, a mural in the city as well as Boy with Lamb, a bronze statue of a country boy. “At first, I wasn’t sure what I was going to make but I decided to go back to watercolors,” Bodzy tells me on the phone. During the days her husband, who joined her on the residency, photographed the places he visited and in turn, Bodzy painted some of these snapshots, one of them including the square where Picasso’s Boy with a Lamb stands. The legend of Picasso (who also encouraged others to come like Henri Matisse, Joan Miró, and Jean Cocteau) looms large in the town. Pfeiffer wrote to me: “Picasso was a genius. Focused and fearless. His work is the definition of confidence.” Also an astrologer, Pfeiffer added: “he is the embodiment of the sign of Scorpio. Just look at his eyes. Very intense.” Picasso moved to Vallauris in 1948 with his partner Françoise Gilot, also an artist, whose career he tried to destroy after she took their two children and left him in 1953.
“My work is about how women move through the world. I have made a series about concealment and beauty. Not negatively—as I both adhere to but have also found ways to overcome societal norms and pressures put on women,” explains Bodzy. As one of the few women graduating from a leading law school in the 1980s she was a pioneer for other women in the field. Bodzy has great respect for Gilot’s story—” she took a great risk breaking away from first her own family and then Picasso in search for autonomy, which she finally found in New York.”
The residency produced an unexpected collaboration, Soledad Cantarno, an Australian ceramicist, approached Bodzy to collaborate on work together. Cantarno made small postcard-size pieces that Bodzy decorated with painting and sgraffito using a dark almost black rough clay with some porcelain slip applied as a rough emulsion with broad brushstrokes—”leaving the edges showing the dark clay,“ Cantarno, who is interested in the materiality of clay wrote me. “Lesley used a very modern and clean decoration in contrast with the pieces creating a great result of rough versus clean lines,” writes Cantarno.
Similar to Bodzy’s approach to material exploration in her sculptural practice, Cantarno enjoys experimenting with clay and glazes. “I love exploring new glazes but I also like leaving clay unglazed as I love the feel of clay in my hands. I do a lot of clay tests to try recipes. I have worked with a lot of crawls and lava glazes as well as many others that are also smooth, satin, clear, or opaque. I have been trying out “gold-ish” manganese glazes but haven’t found one that I’m happy with yet but also don’t want to use them much because of their toxicity. I would love to try goop glazes next, as I find them fascinating,” she says. A collection of heads resembles a modernist aesthetic. She works with both functional designs in larger editions and unique sculptural pieces and explains that interest in ceramics has increased in Australia significantly since COVID with major events like the Australian Ceramics Triennial and Clay Gulgong and as part of a trending interest for the slow-made and hand-made.
Interested in the history of clay, Timea Tihanyi traveled to France to research the origins of European porcelain. In the residency cycle’s closing exhibition, she is showing a video of a soft clay installation she built during her residency. Perhaps it reflects the ornamentation from this research, or an evocation of the hands and bodies of female factory workers of the past at the great French porcelain factories Chantilly, Sévres, or Saint-Cloud: “Using soft clay to hold the hanging fibers together, I have experimented with many forms, some of them are like ornamental patterns, others resemble cell or neuron structures, yet others recall visceral bodily matter: bones and sinews, bird and insect nests.” She titled the work Sisters to reflect that it is about “women, about aging bodies, and connections that individuals use to balance, support, and compete with one another.”
Tihanyi has a background in medicine and neuroscience and she is interested in the differences between feeling and perception versus abstract cognitive processes, like mathematics. “I think our human brains mix these two modalities all the time and I am curious where one begins and the other ends,” she wrote to me. Her latest project Touching Space is a custom-built VR from which users can “shape the sculptures from the inside, by hand” and then download and print with a 3D clay printer. The results will be on at the Ceramics Invitational at the Museum of Northwest Art in 2025. In Seattle where she lives, she founded a Slip Rabbit ceramic studio that was pioneering in 3D printed ceramics and teaches at the University of Washington.
The area is rich in art and home to many sculpture gardens and private foundations centering contemporary art like Chateau Lacoste, Foundation CAB, Foundation Carmignac—and one of the first private museums in the area, The Fondation Maeght, celebrates its 60th anniversary this year. AIR Vallauris organizes an exhibition at the end of each residency cycle exhibiting the work of current residents in a church in a show attended by locals and tourists alike.
Over the past year, Jodi Muzylowski’s material and technical exploration has taken her through Greece, Portugal, Indonesia, and now France where she has worked on raku, and pit firings, as well as Korean Onggi—throwing large vessels on the wheel, but most predominantly she has developed an interest in ash glazes. “…in Lisbon, I went to the site of a wildfire that happened just a week before I had arrived. Part of the area had been a sort of dumping site for construction debris and garbage. The ashes from this site created the most beautiful effects in the glaze I made while at Aviario Studios in Ferreira do Zèzere,” Muzylowski wrote to me. The organizers of a 2-week symposium in Kastraki in Greece she was attending earlier in the year had developed ash glazes using different types of wood—thinking about the wildfires that had spread across Europe and the Americas the idea to make ash glazes from wildfire ash sparked in Muzylowski.
In Vallauris, she is creating a series of pieces using wildfire ash glazes. “They are nonfunctional, decorative pieces influenced by the clay’s plasticity and the glaze’s reactivity to the minerals in the iron-rich clay,” she explained, continuing on her installation design for the closing exhibition: “because the show is in a centuries-old church, I made use the furniture I found inside to create a fresh dialogue between the pieces and the venue.”
One thing that struck me was that the five women of AIR Vallauris’s current cycle all mentioned their positive experiences of working with other women, Pfeiffer wrote: “Living at the residence with a bunch of women is something I haven’t done in decades. Being women artists intensifies the energy.” Bodzy and Cantarno worked together, Muzylowski developed skills with other women during multiple residencies, and Tihanyi wrote passionately working with her students back home in Seattle. It is beautiful when a residency cohort find communion, and important for artists in general.
Follow AIR Vallauris most recent cohort on Instagram: Katie Pfeiffer @kater322, Soledad Contardo @solceramic, Timea Tihanyi @sliprabbitstudio, Jodi Muzylowski, @jmuzylowski, and Lesley Bodzy @lesleybodzy. Apply for the residency here.
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