About

A Unique Artistic Journey

Sophie Manessiez is a ceramic artist whose practice revolves around porcelain as a sensitive structure. Her work explores the tensions between fragility and resistance, singularity and collective form, in a research where material becomes a space of relation, memory, and presence.

After a background in visual arts, communication, and several years in the event industry, she has been fully dedicated to ceramics since 2007. Trained in ceramic fine craft techniques in Montreal, she has developed a sculptural language grounded in repetition, variation, and the precision of gesture. Each element is individually shaped, allowing subtle differences to emerge through the hand, rhythm, and time.

Her work takes the form of wall-based and sculptural compositions in which units interact, creating sensitive structures that are both delicate and rigorous. Porcelain, sometimes brought into dialogue with stoneware, enables her to explore a subtle balance between refinement and tension, apparent lightness and structural strength. Through her work, Sophie Manessiez investigates visible and invisible connections that shape living systems and human relationships. Her pieces evoke sensitive cartographies made of memory, interconnection, and controlled fragility, inviting the viewer to slow down, move, and inhabit space differently.

Based in Canada, she develops a practice rooted in the long temporality of material and in a transatlantic presence between Europe and North America.

Artistic Statement

I work with porcelain as a sensitive structure, exploring what connects, supports, and traverses, and what makes a whole possible beyond its apparent fragility.

From individually shaped elements, I construct composed works grounded in tension, balance, and the precision of the link. Repetition and subtle variation in forms and lines bring forth singularities within seemingly homogeneous ensembles, where each unit retains its presence while contributing to an overall structure.

My work questions how living systems and human connections—familial, social, environmental, or intimate—are formed, weakened, and sustained nonetheless. Relationships become constitutive of form, giving rise to sensitive architectures made of links, memory, and controlled fragility.

Porcelain, the central material of my practice, is sometimes placed in dialogue with stoneware, introducing a tension between delicacy and resistance. My works engage the wall and space as territories of relation, where balance is perceived in the in-between, through the accuracy of gesture and the strength of the link.