About Joelle Sept Ceramics
Joelle Sept makes mugs and bowls at Pleasant Pottery Studio in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. She throws them on the wheel and uses underglaze to create illustrations.
About Joelle
Joelle’s ceramic practice began at Emily Carr University, back when it was on Granville Island. Since then, she has pursued it intermittently while training and working as a Landscape Architect. She finds the two practices to be in balance – shaping clay with her hands is an immediate and physical counterpart to the long-term planning and design thinking that comes with working on a project team. Both have to do with land, earth and plants.
She lives in Mount Pleasant with her husband and corgi.
Joelle’s Practice
Joelle currently makes ceramics at Pleasant Pottery, a studio that allows individual membership and hosts occasional classes.
In the spirit of decorated functional ware that gets broken and dug up later, Joelle creates bowls with scenes of contemporary life. They speak to our modern lifestyles, technologies and styles, but aspire to be timeless in their depiction of human nature.
The inside of a bowl is like a lens that gives us a view onto a scene, providing the opportunity for optical illusions, and for different conceptions of up and down, centre and edge, flat and warped. In modern life, lenses and points of view abound – this is how we view, portray and conceptualize ourselves and the world around us. Joelle’s illustrations consider point-of-view and the mediated world, depicting screens, phones and social media framing – but in a way that is affectionate, not judgmental or cliché.
Joelle is interested in clipart, mirrors, stock photos, memes, and poses. While these can be tropes, we also see ourselves and individualize ourselves by re-enacting common scenes. A woman putting on mascara, widening her eyes into the mirror to avoid smudging, may be caught in a private moment, captured forever in a high-fired bowl. Or she may be broadcasting her beauty routine to her followers online. In another bowl, a woman in a dark forest realizes with fear that her phone has no signal, a common scene in horror films.
Joelle also makes variations on the design of cartoon faces as flower petals. It is like a family of people, stuck together – some silly, some angry, some annoyed with each other.
She also enjoys making dense floral patterns of flotsam, coral, or any plants real or imagined.
Joelle is open to commissions of yourself, or your loved ones, enjoying their favourite food within a bowl. The link between functional ware and food is fundamental to pottery, and Joelle explores it by letting the portrait be a little unflattering, as the subject opens their mouth to chow down unselfconsciously on a burger, corn cob, or any sort of handheld meal.
Caring for your Ceramics
Joelle only uses food-safe glazes, and underglazes that are food-safe when covered with a clear glaze. Her bowls and mugs can be hand-washed with regular dish soap, or wash in the dishwasher. In fact, she runs her work through the dishwasher before putting it up for sale – unless it just got out of the kiln that very day!
Her philosophy is that you can either keep your precious ceramics in a glass case for your whole life, or you can eat cereal or drink tea out of them every day. If you choose the latter, eventually you will drop them on the floor and they will break. But that way, at least you enjoyed looking at it and touching it every day – hopefully for years of your life!