From her studio in Toulouse, Violaine Ulmer creates a wardrobe of women’s wardrobe pieces, cut from porcelain and assembled together like a dressmaker.
The artist works the porcelain as if she were making haute couture garments. First she draws a pattern and then she cuts out the rolled porcelain as if it were a piece of cloth, before finally assembling the various pieces.
Ulmer’s ‘wardrobe’ already includes shoes, lingerie, a bag, a swimming cap, some T-shirts and several pairs of glasses, garments and accessories frozen forever in the perfectness of porcelain. The visual arts graduate, who studied at the Panthéon-Sorbonne in Paris, prefers to work with this matte, translucent and almost ghostly whiteness instead of incorporating colour. This would make her designs more rooted in reality, a story she does not want to tell.
The long and delicate operation requires a mastery of several trades, combining the skills of a seamstress, a bootmaker and a ceramic artist. The hard part, she says, is to reconcile what she wants to create with what is technically possible.
