Pottery
workshop
crafts and shop
The workshop produces tableware mainly intended for the Domaine’s table, but which now also adorns the tables of restaurants, decoration shops, florists, architects-decorators, galleries, guest houses, and now also decorates your homes.
Today this workshop offers a small shop on site by appointment and an online shop.
In the footsteps of the potter canons
Setting up a ceramics workshop at the Domaine des Chanoines Blancs means continuing the tradition of the canons of the Premonstratensian order, who were already preparing their terracotta here several centuries ago.
Our little country workshop
The workshop uses stoneware from Saint-Amand-en-Puisaye and Limoges porcelain, lead-free, food-grade enamels.
We use simple and traditional techniques and tools. The time spent on each step can be several weeks, especially for drying the clay which depends on the ambient humidity. Our clay comes from France, the ceramics are all made in the amin, dried, softened, enameled and then fired in the oven between 1250 and 1280 degrees.
The ceramist
Trained at the CNIFOP in Saint-Amand-en-Puisaye, the potters’ school, Laurence then completed numerous internships in workshops with seasoned and renowned potters, to deepen the techniques of throwing, modeling, molding, raku, mishima, but also enameling and firing.
Intentionally textured, the pieces can retain the trace of the gesture, which is also sought after by connoisseurs.
Simple-to-use objects
Our pieces are made of waterproof stoneware. This material, resistant to the shocks of everyday life, is easy to clean and can be used in the microwave as well as the dishwasher. Because beauty must also be practical! However, be careful of thermal shocks that risk damaging your objects. For example, avoid putting a dish that has spent several hours in the refrigerator in a hot oven.
Respect for materials
True to our values, the Workshop is committed to reducing its waste. Broken pieces are sometimes given to people who want to give them a second life. End of series, pieces with small defects and prototypes are sold at low prices during sales. The clay and enamels are recycled to give birth to new colors and new pieces.
Introduction to pottery
The workshop offers individual introductory sessions in throwing, modeling, and enameling.
Discovering throwing
Discover the potter’s wheel and create a unique thrown piece. Turn it, decorate it, and enamel it. We take care of firing it.
With stoneware.
65 euros – 2h30 – by reservation
Discovering modeling
Discover modeling and its techniques, pinching, in the mass, on the plate, stamping or coils).
With stoneware.
50 euros – 2h30 – by reservation
Our workshop is equipped with a wheel, a kiln, and works with black and white stoneware from Saint Amand en Puisaye, and porcelain.
The trainee leaves with all of his or her production. We provide the clay, engobes, enamel, and we handle the firing.
We also offer a series of classes, in groups of 5, which allows you to revisit certain pieces, give them time to dry quietly, and think about your pieces between sessions.
The pieces are made for food use (lead-free).
All practical details by email when contacting us for a reservation. A detail that regulars will appreciate: the workshop is heated.
Gallery
Guest Artist
Stéphane RICCIO
A meeting with Stéphane, artist designer tattooist illustrator, who tattoos our terracotta: the collaboration is original. To discover!
The artist Stéphane RICCIO, who after a first professional life dedicated to pencil drawing and the design of cartoons as an animator, decided to devote himself from now on to painting on canvas or digital, to precious or monumental sculptures, in wood, resin or paper, borrowing from the cultures of Oceania or Japanese folklore but also drawing from the repertoire of European popular iconography.
The collab, an already experienced artist, illustrator, graffiti artist, designer, sculptor, meets clay, and the artisanal know-how of a small country workshop that models stoneware and turns porcelain.
The workshop shapes the objects, the artist decorates and enamels them, then a double firing makes these objects durable and food-safe.
After obtaining a baccalaureate in literature and plastic arts in 1990, Stéphane RICCIO drew up plans for an architect for a few months, a sort of internship prefiguring his entry into the School of Architecture in Montpellier.
Very quickly, however, he left the benches to launch into illustration, and specialized in realistic drawing with pencil and airbrush.
Quickly spotted, he joined a cartoon design company and became an animator.
After eight years spent in the service of pencil drawing, he decided to give in to the arrival of digital and then devoted himself to tattooing.
Tattoo artist recognized by the greatest, having developed for 20 years now a real passion for this art, whose name comes from a Tahitian word meaning drawing (ta) and spirit (atua), he travels the world with his needles: Japan, Germany, Luxembourg, Spain, New Zealand, …
A lifelong artist, Stéphane RICCIO paints on canvas or digitally, and has been “butchering” polystyrene for years.
The 6 wild ducks of Stéphane RICCIO were born during this presidential campaign marked by “affairs”. These ducks are a tribute to the press and its history.
Georges Clémenceau, this tiger who was not only made of paper, founded in 1913 a newspaper called “L’homme libre” openly criticizing the government. Victim of censorship, he transformed the title in 1914 and now called it “L’homme enchaîné”.
This episode and the determination of Georges Clémenceau would be at the origin of Maurice Maréchal’s choice when he founded “his chained duck” in 1915. A “lively, clean, and free” newspaper … attacking “war, censorship, politicians, businessmen, powers, the guillotine …” a newspaper in which journalists committed to renounce all public employment and all distinction, and to publish only rigorously false information … the only ones that can be trusted in times of war. Stéphane RICCIO, in the manner of a committed Jeff Koons who would have happily dismissed his army of assistants, borrows from Pop Art by drawing on the repertoire of popular iconography. He prints and tattoos on his ducks, whose affiliation with a supercharged Donald Duck seems little doubtful, the words of the time. Those of a press that has chosen to remain free and curious, even if it means unleashing passions and splashing the seated somewhat by putting its big webbed feet in the pond.
But let’s be precise: the 6 ducks (62 x 73 cm) by Stéphane RICCIO were carved with a kitchen knife and scalpel, in a block of high-density polystyrene (30 to 40 kg per m3), the newspaper was soaked in a dilution of vinyl glue then applied to the sculpted polystyrene.
After drying, he added paint stains, aged the paper with coffee, and solidified the whole with a polyurethane resin.
The art of the craftsman consists “thanks to a particular know-how and outside of an industrial context” in manufacturing “sometimes decorative objects often made manually with traditional materials and tools”.
And it is this art that Stéphane RICCIO practices with perfect knowledge of the causes and its effects.