Manufacture

Agnès Emery paints the tiles by hand herself, because it is a practice that lies between art and craftsmanship, like a kind of calligraphy whose writing is identifiable and unique.

It is a creation that must remain spontaneous, there is no preliminary identification but a free interpretation on the basis of a very schematic project.
And it must stay like that, so that the pleasure of painting remains because it can always be seen in the result.
We are therefore far from factory assembly line work … and mass production.

The tiles are fired up to 800° Celsius.
An operation that has to be repeated for each colour so that they won’t mix and lose their identity.

The patterns are painted freely without prior outline, no tile is really identical to the other, barely noticeable nuances
make all the difference with a mechanically repeated image.

Multiple and unpredictable “accidents” are also visible, charming most of the time
because they are as far as possible from the artificially cracked effect on industrial production.

Given the way they are produced, it is quite pointless to order everything in duplicate to ensure that broken tiles can be replaced, at least for the patterns that connect.
These tiles remain unique pieces that we cannot and do not want to produce in industrial quantities.
On the other hand, we can react immediately to replace some tiles, providing that we receive a scan or a photo allowing us to find the position of the connections.