Raphaël Emine

Inspired by anthropologist Tim Ingold and landscape designer Gilles Clément, Raphaël Emine seeks to dissolve the boundary between theoretical knowledge and practical making. His sculptural practice centres on ceramics, combining traditional clay modelling with contemporary technologies such as 3D printing. Mathematics, botany and entomology inform complex forms that evoke anthropomorphic architecture as much as animal construction. Plants, insects and bacteria are sometimes introduced into the works, turning sculpture into a site of coexistence rather than a closed object. At the intersection of utopian architecture, the plant world and the decorative arts, Emine designs ceramic structures capable of sheltering life and changing alongside it. His work thus tests new relationships between creation and nature, imagining possible forms of cohabitation between living organisms and matter conventionally described as inert.