Dominique Mercadal

Trained in Applied Arts in Lyon with a focus on textile design, Dominique Mercadal first worked in the world of patterns and surface design before finding in ceramics a deeper, more organic language. She studied glaze creation for three years under Véronique Depondt, and is partly self-taught in her approach to working with clay. Over the years, she has refined her practice, guided by observation and the repetition of gestures.

Now based in Paris, she mainly works with stoneware, which she shapes not on a potter’s wheel but using slabs of clay that are cut, assembled, sanded, and punctured — in a slow, patient, almost meditative process.

In her pieces, everything happens on the surface, and yet everything seems to come from within. As if the form had slowly emerged, through sedimentation, like a body or a landscape shaped by time. The connection between her work and the human body is not literal but deeply felt: the clay becomes soft, a porous membrane marked by tools, grooves, folds, and bubbles. Each piece invites touch and feeling.

Dominique Mercadal’s formal vocabulary evokes geological layers, waves, clouds, flows. But above all, one feels an internal movement. The glaze, applied in fine layers, acts like a veil, revealing underlying tensions. Her pieces breathe, quite literally: they have a rhythm, a texture, a density that invites a tactile gaze.

“I start from a slab of clay, and I let it evolve… I like the eye to get lost in it, for the form to reveal itself gradually, like skin that retains the trace of touch.”

In her sculptural work, she also incorporates elements inspired by the human body — an eye, a curve, a silhouette.

In ceramics, fire fixes what the hand has begun. For Dominique Mercadal, this moment is almost a rite: from formless matter is born a presence, silent yet vibrant, like a suspended tension between hand and memory.

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"Time does not pass but is overlapping", says Dominique Mercadal whose enamelled stoneware, accumulated strata that she striates or stamps, softens everything. She works on them in series and on the plate, a sort of template or sewing pattern, no doubt in memory of her first textile creations. Everywhere, graphic motifs saturate the surface which undulates and takes familial shapes: cloud, tree, wave... Dominique Mercadal's "faux-unis" deceive the eye which believes to see in these "pixelated" volumes colored of sand or soot, the pretty things that nature produces. Thus, these solitary sheeps riddled with dots, that one would think escaped from a Seurat painting, or these mountains, round-bosses dug with furrows like the Cairn of Gavrinis, syntheses between a plowed field and a Zen garden. The climate, a priori mild, is in crisis, and the catastrophe approaches: tsunami, charred trunk, mudslide.... In dreams or in real life, Dominique Mercadal comes across threatened landscapes. Her large dry basins attest to this: their source has dried up and on the stone, only the ripples remain of the water that once cascaded. For every void, there is a fullness in these clear and obscure pieces, "mounted" slowly, by chance or accident, so unpredictable is their material. Placed flat or on the wall, they are lands of contrasts.

Virginie Huet