Closing this month at Paris’s Galerie SCENE OUVERTE is Booming Moon, a solo exhibition of work by artist-designer Célia Bertrand. Just a few years into her creative career, Bertrand is developing a reputation for highly intricate, intimate works in porcelain and metal. In her former life, she specialized in heritage restoration after studying art history and archaeology.  When you listen to her describe her work, it’s clear she brings a wholehearted lyricism to everything she does, with a dedication not unlike epic poetry from the ancient world.

Bertrand has written a kind of poem of her own, describing the thoughts and ideals that she had in mind while creating the objects destined for the Blooming Moon exhibition. Scroll on to discover an excerpt of her words, accompanied by a video interview about her process.

This exhibition is built like a journey, where the poetic mixes with the imaginary, like a garden that has bloomed on the moon.

The moon evokes to me a world of silence and mystery with its reliefs and changing curves. An unreachable but dreamed elsewhere; mythology and legends. It fascinates by its influence on nature as well as on the tides and gardens.

The moon also has a chromatic range of white and blue that inspires me along with  its halos that always draw different shapes. It gives off a soft, enveloping, and reassuring light.

The vegetal world is reflected through the curves, the movement, the materials: the corollas of the lights are a bit like petals in bloom… The lines are meant to be pure and airy, made of curves that no right angle breaks. Linear shapes unfold to fit into the space.

The materials, the reliefs, the cracks, give an impression of movement, where nothing seems fixed and give each piece its own identity. Each piece is shaped by hand to obtain a unique piece.

I like to rely on a phrase by Camille Claudel, who speaks of spiritual clay, fragile like a dream, indestructible like an idea.

—Célia Bertrand