Vessels: Bodies, Tales & Machines

corporeal, mental, societal – starting with the body, the first place that contains us. A vessel offers multiple realities; the container, its external envelope, the content, the concealed inside part, and these invisible stories that are nested within it and which connect the inside to the outside. Working across disciplines such as ceramic, 3D printing, painting, textile and mixed media, Jeanne Verdoux, Nicolas Touron and Fanny Allié demonstrate their different interpretations and approaches to the idea of Vessel and what it means to them. Jeanne Verdoux’s work explores loss, grief, and resilience through surrealistic interpretations of the feminine body, balancing deep emotional weight with humor and visual poetry. Using clay and two-dimensional mediums—drawing and printmaking— she creates anthropomorphized forms and body parts turned into vessels. Faces, limbs, torsos, and other bodily elements appear to merge, repeat, or resist a clear anatomical reading. Her sculptures fight with gravity to keep their balance but are anchored by their weight, vibrant colors and tactile textures. The characters in Fanny Allié’s work are layered receptacles made out of discarded materials, inner lining turned inside out, the interior brought up to the outside. She finds stories within the discarded remnants that she uses, elevating them as icons of interpersonal connections and as relics of ephemerality, memory, passage and loss. These stories and their figures are born from personal and broadly collective experiences, shared mythologies anchored in an urban environment. The human figures that inhabit her work constantly travel between these two interconnect- ed spaces: the inside and the outside. Her porous and hybridized characters are a result of her relationship to the world, a personal statement but they are also penetrated by “the outside”, her environment, city life, encounters, observed moments and gestures and what the world goes through on a daily basis. In his 3D printed porcelain vessels, Nicolas Touron navigates between the inside of 3D rendering programs and the output of 3D clay printer while exemplifying the back and forth games that digital technology can offer. Nicolas Tou- ron is an oral storyteller, enhancing and embellishing his partly open, partly closed porcelain sculptures each time they are created, inside his complex digital universe. The visual fables that emerge from them, come in the form of complex structures 3D printed in porcelain onto which Borosilicate glass is then added, in collaboration with glass artist Amy Lemaire. Using a series of complex 3D formatting tools, the result is a maze-like meander in a digital and phantasmagoric universe. Vessels: Bodies, Tales & Machines is an exploration of the stories that emerge from these open, partly closed, digital, flat, layered, porous and punctured receptacles for which inside and outside blur. Through the vessel, the threeartists who came from the same place and immigrated to the same country expose their personal meander anreflection on their own place in the world. From left to right: “Rabbit Girl” Ceramic and glass, 17x7x8 in, 2026 Jeanne Verdoux “Face in Hand” (detail) Found fabric, collograph prints and acrylic paint, 57.5in x 50.5in, 2026 Fanny Allié “Nature 5” 3D Printed Porcelain and borosilicate, 18x14x12 in, 2023