Valerie Bernardini

detail, black porcelain glazed on transparent glass

Valerie Bernardini is a London-based ceramic artist.

Born and raised in Brittany, France, Valerie has lived and worked as a photographer in Paris, Tokyo, Singapore and now London. Valerie studied art and photography in France, and later ceramics in the UK, where she took a two-year Diploma course at Morley College, graduating in 2020.

Valerie’s Morley College graduation work Maelstrom was shortlisted for ‘Fresh’ and exhibited at the British Ceramics Biennal in Stoke-On-Trent in 2021.

Inspired by the natural environment and investigating new ways of working, Valerie explores the dynamic processes of clay, glass, and photography.

Valerie is interested in collaborations and in developing relationships with galleries in the UK and abroad.

close up of white porcelain with textured glaze, like floating crystals salt and myself behind

Valerie makes sculptural pieces from porcelain and glass, using their translucency and transparency to inject a sense of fluidity and motion into her sculptures. Her work is about transposing emotions in clay. She tries to conjure movement, emotions and sensations through a combination of complex organic forms and experimental glazes. She complements her 3D work with experimental photography, transforming her organic ceramic forms into intriguing, surreal prints.

The relation between her ceramic practice and photographic work is intense: the dialogue between materials and the photographs is central to her process of making. Valerie’s ceramic pieces are a response to detailed/close up photographs of previous pieces. She creates with clay, but her work only feels finished once she has looked at it through the lens of the camera. The close-ups she takes of her work are beautiful abstract images, which she often presents near the work that inspired them, but which constitute a collection in their own right.

Valerie uses a range of techniques for her work, extruding or slip-casting to create complex sculptural pieces. Sometimes she emphasises stress, pressure and tension, sometimes a repetitive use of fragments. The form of the individual pattern is repeated in the outcome of the overall work. She enjoys imperfections and irregularities. Her glazes play a defining role in the final aspect of each piece: the porcelain form becomes tactile, ambiguous, mysterious.

Making is a physical involvement. Valerie treats the raw porcelain as a partner in a conversation. Her work emerges gradually: it is like seeing the birth of a living organism, growing and developing in accelerated motion under her eyes, as if filmed in time-lapse motion.

Between organic form and mineral substance, her work is an evocation of what brings spice to one’s life: fragile moments, intense emotions, fluid sensations. Light is the master of ceremony in works that are born of the marriage of photography and ceramics.