The Reims-based ceramicist has created a bespoke collection for the Maison Taittinger, in which the clay and enamel echo the raw materials used in champagne.
The workshop is bright and serene, overlooking a garden, its walls lined with wooden shelves stacked with bowls painted in delicate shades. With a lump of earth in the palm of her hand, Lauriane Payer is preparing to transform clay into art. “I could start out with a drawing, but I really feel that it’s only when you get your hands into the clay that you start having ideas. Once you start producing, something whirs into life,” the ceramicist explains. Having initially explored painting as a medium, she went on to train in Paris with sculptor Grégoire Scalabre, almost three years ago.
Specialising in pottery, she enjoys the sheer possibilities of ceramics; “the intertwining of art and craft, making collections of items that are utilitarian, but also artworks to be admired.” Fine dining restaurant La Grande Georgette, opposite the Reims cathedral, ordered its first series of pieces in 2022 while Payer was setting up her creative studio (Atome). Her workshop has since become a place of cross-pollination and osmosis, in which she gives both beginner classes and the option to come and work on a piece from time to time.
Shaping the clay by hand makes each piece unique; it is a process that is time-consuming, deeply artisanal and dear to our ceramicist. This has not prevented her from engaging in multiple collaborations. “Rather than simply suggesting my own pieces, what I like to do is create collections together with the person who ordered them,” she explains.
This was how Résonance came about: the collection took shape through discussions with Vitalie Taittinger and the director of the Taittinger Experience, Audrey Malacain, and was unveiled this July in “Chromatique,” the Maison’s new concept store. Initially the artist thought about making coupes, in a nod to how champagne is best enjoyed, but ceramics do not make for an optimal tasting experience.
The link to champagne would have to be more subtle. Intertwining the colours of her raw material and its environment, the green of the vines and white of the chalky soil, Lauriane Payer has created a collection of unique pieces in glazed porcelain, with a mineral and poetic hue. The collection echoes the material used to create the pieces – clay – which also evokes the atmosphere in the underground chalk caverns where champagne is matured.
Once the pieces have been thrown, assembled and dried, the ceramicist fires the pieces once, before applying the glaze that confers their glassy finish and soft, faded shades of green. The pieces are then fired again at 1250°C, to fuse the glaze to the clay. “No matter how well I know my clay or my glazes, I’m never fully in control of what comes out of the oven. There are always surprises, depending on which pieces are beside one another or how full the kiln is; that’s what’s interesting and what makes these pieces so unique, even if they’re part of the same series.”
