Pascale Girardin builds ceramic sculptures rooted in a rich relational practice, where material, form, and living systems are intimately entwined.
Heliotrope (detail), 2026, underglaze on stoneware, 155 cm x 37 cm.
Working at the intersection of art and design, Girardin’s sculpture is grounded in a sustained engagement with material and process. For more than three decades, she has explored the relationship between clay and the body, and between ceramic sculpture and its setting. Moving fluidly between conceptual and formal concerns, she has developed a distinctive practice spanning hand-formed stoneware, slip-cast porcelain, and large-scale installation.
The proposed exhibition brings together a new body of work developed during Girardin’s residency at Medalta, in Medicine Hat: a series of large-scale, coil-built totems that extend the figurative vocabulary of her practice.
While Girardin has previously built vertical forms as abstract vessels, these recent works introduce an allegorical element. Each culminates in a pair of upright ears—those of a deer or a rabbit—inflecting these monumental sculptures with the attributes of a parable or myth.
Watch (detail), 2026, unglazed stoneware, 155 cm x 34 cm.
Pascale Girardin: Common Ground
Girardin’s practice has long been shaped by an engagement with time as process—the longue durée of making, in which form emerges through accumulation, attention, and transformation. Her recent sculptures took shape during a residency in the Canadian Badlands in the summer of 2026, where the surrounding landscape became an active source of observation and reflection.
Moving daily through the prairie ecosystem surrounding the studio, Girardin gradually shifted her attention, learning to slow down and observe differently. This experience nourished an openness to the ways in which place can enter the creative process and inflect the language of form.
The resulting sculptures occupy an ambiguous space between animal, vegetal, and mineral. Built through coiling, section by section, the large-scale totemic forms are accompanied by smaller works that evoke rocks, shoots, leaves, berries, grasses, or fragments of shrubs. Some suggest ears or horns, recalling the rabbits and deer encountered during the residency. Rather than reproducing specific elements of the landscape, the sculptures operate through resonance: an ambiguity that reflects the way the artist has come to understand herself as “one element among others.”
The Path (detail), 2026, unglazed stoneware, 54 cm x 14 cm.
Common Ground brings this idea of interdependence into the exhibition space. Seen from both front and back, some sculptures appear to respond to one another while others remain at a distance; smaller forms take their place at the feet of the larger.
Ten glazed stoneware stools, shaped through coiling and pinching and distinguished by their varied forms and lively glazes, are arranged among the sculptures. Breaking with the more unified surfaces of the larger works, they introduce a human scale and invite visitors to pause, sit, and converse.
The title Common Ground names this shared space, where beings, materials, and environments coexist. Girardin invites us not only to look at a landscape, but to consider what it means to be within it—to attend to what surrounds us, to listen to what manifests itself there, and to recognize ourselves as part of a larger, plural, and constantly changing network of relations.
Selected works
Watch, 2026, unglazed stoneware, 155 cm x 34 cm
Saskatoon, 2026, underglaze on stoneware, 140 cm x 34 cm
Heliotrope, 2026, underglaze on stoneware, 155 cm x 37 cm
Dusk, 2026, unglazed stoneware, 165 cm x 32 cm
Moonlight, 2026, unglazed stoneware, 154 cm x 32 cm
Hush, 2026, underglaze on stoneware, 38 cm x 15 cm
Lykos, 2026, unglazed stoneware, 45 cm x 20 cm
The Path, 2026, unglazed stoneware, 54 cm x 14 cm
Stillness, 2026, unglazed stoneware, 48 cm x 20 cm
Tread lightly, 2026, unglazed stoneware, 40 cm x 10 cm
East-ward, 2026, unglazed stoneware, 42 cm x 27 cm
Aube, 2026, unglazed stoneware, 49 cm x 15 cm
What I Found, 2026, unglazed stoneware, 49 cm x 25 cm
Dusk, 2026, unglazed stoneware, 55 cm x 17 cm
Nightfall, 2026, underglaze on stoneware, 58 cm x 33 cm
Own it, 2026, underglaze on stoneware, 76 cm x 34 cm
Kinship, 2026, unglazed stoneware, 55 cm x 34 cm
June, 2026, unglazed stoneware, 39 cm x 11 cm
Quiescence, 2026, unglazed stoneware, 54 cm x 20 cm
Figura 04, 2020-21, vitreous slip on stoneware, 156.5 cm x 54.5 cm
Figura 06 , 2023, vitreous slip on stoneware, 45 cm x 24 cm
Figura 08, 2020-21, vitreous slip on stoneware, 156 cm x 37 cm
Figura II 17, 2023, vitreous slip on stoneware, 118 cm x 50 cm
Figura II 20, 2023, vitreous slip on stoneware, 85 cm x 54.5 cm
Figura 09, 2020-21, vitreous slip on stoneware, 154.5 cm x 63 cm
Figura 03 , 2023, vitreous slip on stoneware, 59 cm x 27 cm
Figura 01 , 2023, vitreous slip on stoneware, 57 cm x 23.5 cm
Figura 07, 2020-21, vitreous slip on stoneware, 155.5 cm x 42 cm
Figura II 24, 2023, vitreous slip on stoneware, 119 cm x 30.5 cm
Figura 11 , 2023, vitreous slip on stoneware, 38 cm x 26 cm
Figura 25 , 2023, vitreous slip on stoneware, 126 cm x 52 cm
Figura 21 , 2023, vitreous slip on stoneware, 113.5 cm x 46 cm
Figura 17 , 2023, vitreous slip on stoneware, 57 cm x 25 cm
Figura 07 , 2023, vitreous slip on stoneware, 76.5 cm x 29.5 cm
Figura 08 , 2023, vitreous slip on stoneware, 70 cm x 29 cm
Figura 03 , 2023, vitreous slip on stoneware, 110 cm x 52 cm
Figura 24, 2023, vitreous slip on stoneware, 90 cm x 30.5 cm
Figura 01, 2020-21, vitreous slip on stoneware, 151.5 cm x 22 cm
Arabesque, 2025, glazed stoneware, 42.5 cm x 28 cm
Baltique, 2025, glazed stoneware, 37 cm x 29 cm
Corail, 2025, glazed stoneware, 37 cm x 29 cm
Denim, 2025, glazed stoneware, 36 cm x 28 cm
Grenat, 2025, glazed stoneware, 37 cm x 29 cm
Iris, 2025, glazed stoneware, 37 cm x 29 cm
Lichen, 2025, glazed stoneware, 36 cm x 28.5 cm
Miel, 2025, glazed stoneware, 37 cm x 29 cm
Nimbe, 2025, glazed stoneware, 37 cm x 29 cm
Clementine, 2025, glazed stoneware, 37 cm x 29 cm
Image gallery
Canadian b. 1968 Over the past three decades, Pascale Girardin has been active in the world of ceramics, visual arts and design. Her practice as a sculptor, ranging from individual objects to large-scale installations, is predicated on an affinity for materials that can be hand-formed, such as stoneware.
Girardin holds a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Concordia University and a Master’s degree in Visual and Media Arts from the Université du Québec à Montréal. This background has shaped a rigorous, research-based practice informed by numerous residencies.
Her achievements as an artist have earned her awards and public commissions, all while maintaining an internationally renowned design practice. Collaborating with some of the world’s foremost architects and design studios, including Peter Marino and Yabu Pushelberg, Atelier Pascale Girardin has undertaken commissions in New York, Paris, Shanghai, and Dubai.
Pascale Girardin
“I chose to make a career out of mud. To look into that mud and say I see beauty.”