Pascale Girardin is a Montreal-based artist whose time-based and relational approach to her ceramic practice has earned her commissions around the world.
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.
Figura 7, 2020. Black vitreous slip on stoneware. 155 cm height by 42 cm diameter.
“Coil building. This slow process allows for deep reflection: my hands shape while my mind wanders.”
“An artist’s statement can also be constructed from the material traces of making.”
Pascale Girardin: Present Tense
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, delay, and transformation. In these recent works, that extended temporality is brought into tension with an intensified focus on presence: on the immediacy of perception, attention, and encounter.
This dual orientation—toward duration and toward the present moment—is felt throughout the exhibition. Coil by coil, the structures register time vertically through moments of decision, adjustment, and response. In this way, an extended process is condensed into a single, upright form: a compressed timeline.
Hovering between stillness and alertness, the ears atop these most recent works propose something more. No longer purely formal or anthropomorphic, these totems take on an additional dimension. Ears signify receptiveness and attunement. Like antennae or radar surfaces, they imply the presence of signals—auditory, environmental, or otherwise—situating the sculptures within a field that extends beyond themselves. The works are not closed objects but open systems, poised in a state of reception.
Detail of Epilogue, 2024, fired and unfired stoneware, dimensions variable.
Present Tense names both a temporal and an ethical position. It signals a shift from time understood as duration alone to time as lived immediacy: a call to attend, to listen, and to situate oneself within a larger web of relations. If the longue durée speaks to the slow unfolding of form across time, the present tense insists on the urgency of perception within that continuum.
This emphasis on relationality resonates with philosophical frameworks that understand the world as an interconnected field rather than a collection of discrete entities. In Girardin’s case, however, this orientation is not only conceptual. Informed in part by her early studies in the biological sciences, her work reflects an understanding—fundamental to contemporary science—that living systems are constituted through dynamic relationships, interdependence, and exchange. Organisms do not exist in isolation, but emerge through continuous interaction with their environments, forming complex, adaptive networks.
“Finally, after a gestation period of days, weeks or months, a piece will suddenly reveal itself. I’ll make connections that I hadn’t made before.”
Selected works
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.”