How I started

Bio

Marina was born in Toulon in the South of France and spent part of her childhood in the rich coastal plains of Gabon, before moving to Alsace near the Vosges mountains and then to England. Her immersion in different landscapes and cultures fostered a sense of curiosity towards the transience of existence, which continues to inform her creative practice. She studied sculpture at Falmouth School of Art and later did a two-year City and Guilds in ceramics in Nottingham.

Marina’s love for clay as her medium of expression resides in the ancient connection between people and the Earth. During her sculpture degree, she started investigating the role of art in human life by studying the primal art of various cultures, being especially drawn to ritualistic and sacred objects. She creates mainly hand-built figurative pieces exploring creative traditions of Earth and Spirit and is particularly interested in the way objects impact our daily life, directly influence our surroundings, and affect our wellbeing and sense of self. The core of her ceramic practice centres around the idea of capturing the unseen essence of nature, being and phenomena into physical form as well as the investigation of subconscious narratives.
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She uses a variety of hand-building and sculpting techniques, such as coiling, pinching, carving, tearing and modelling, to make her pieces in porcelain and stoneware clays. Underglazes, oxides, slips, glazes and gold lustre are applied through a variety of decorative processes to bisque and sometimes greenware. The work is then fired in an oxidation atmosphere to 1235°C.