These Are Not Cardboard – Honest: Jacques Monneraud’s Cardboard Pottery
I still don’t believe it – do you? These cardboard-looking vases, pots and pitchers, apparently held together with strips of tape, are actually ceramic. They’re part of the Carton series by French potter Jacques Monneraud.
The detail is so spot on. Something that looks relatively simple took many hours of experimentation, mixing three different stonewares and testing glazes until he found just the right effect for the tape. He totally nailed it.
Monneraud often explores those little ‘what if…?’ ideas. You know the sort – when your mind wanders and you suddenly think, could I make that?
With Carton, he was playing with the idea of not trusting appearances. Cardboard is something we associate with being temporary, fragile and disposable, so he liked the thought of creating ‘unalterable cardboard’ – objects that look makeshift but are actually substantial and permanent.
The illusion gets even better when you realise these aren’t simply sculptures. The stoneware is fired at 1270°C and the finished vessels are waterproof and functional. The pieces of ‘tape’ are actually the glazed areas.
I love his website too. The whole thing is beautifully presented and the descriptions are written with the same sense of humour as the work. Even when you know what you’re looking at, your brain still wants to insist it’s cardboard.
It also reminded me of Katharine Morling’s wonderful porcelain sculptures, which look like black-and-white drawings brought into three dimensions. I clearly have a soft spot for ceramics pretending to be something they’re not.
And, rather neatly, a few weeks after finding Monneraud’s work I was looking at cardboard again – only this time it really was cardboard – in Eva Jospin’s intricate sculptures.
Originally found via Designboom.
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