Open Studio Artist-in-Residence

Agathe Bertin (b.1995, Saint-Brieuc, France), our 23rd artist-in-residence, won the Fondation CAB 2022 prize that rewards a graduate student from La Cambre.

Agathe Bertin uses clay as the main medium of her practice, questioning its relationship with architecture, the elements of construction and surfaces, and the treatment of colour. Her projects question the tensions between built and natural landscapes, the empirical transformations that give shape to materials and the relationship to the time of construction.

After studying interior architecture and scenography at the École Duperré in Paris, she turned to ceramics. Initially studying for a DMA in craft ceramics in Paris, she continued her studies at the ceramics department of the École de la Cambre in Brussels. After graduating with a master’s degree in June 2022, her project Affleurements, État des lieux d’un territoire, questions the movements of materials that make up the volumes of a territory. Based on the collection of sand and clay, impressions and casts from Brittany, her sculptures in sandstone and plaster freeze some of the fragments that make up this world, where full and empty evoke the flows of the landscape, the actions of humans and time.

During her residency, Agathe created a sandstone tile mural in a range of sand and clay-based coatings. She also did research around mouldings in the Brussels landscape, mixing plaster work and installations in compressed raw earth.