At the age of 17, Agnès Debizet decided to embroider a tablecloth. She began by carefully stitching a border, line after line of dark and light blue. After a couple of weeks, working on it everywhere she went, the person she was making it for disappeared from her life. The pattern went rogue and the work transformed from a domestic pursuit to a years-long artistic one. She added two phoenix-like figures in the centre, surrounding them with birds in flight. Twenty years after she had started, she finally finished it. Today the astonishing piece hangs in a back room of her apartment in the Marais.
Agnès Debizet in her Marais home and atelier © Romain Laprade
The 68-year-old French artist has lived there since the late 1990s. With her late husband, Lucien, she raised four children in the flat and handcrafted almost every object across its dozen or so rooms – from the living-room bookshelves, constructed with wooden planks, to a chandelier made of champagne muselets. It’s also been a studio-hub for her decades-long artistic practice, not in textiles but in ceramics – examples of which are the subject of a newly opened solo show at Galerie Gastou.
“From the first moment I took clay in my hands, I knew I would be able to create a whole world of forms with it,” says Debizet, petite and energetic with wiry white hair. In the 1980s, she took night classes at the Paris pottery studio overseen by ceramicist Albert Minot, but she is mostly self-taught. Her process is one of constant experimentation, from which she builds coiling sculptural forms resembling strange plant life and otherworldly creatures. Some have bubbling textures, others are laced with holes. If one of her pieces cracks or explodes in the kiln, she repairs it in a variety of self-invented ways.
