Eri Maeda

Every spring, Art Paris comes back to the Grand Palais. This year, like every year, I walked in excited and headed straight to the Promises section — dedicated to galleries established within the last ten years. Fresh energy, real risks. Always my first stop.

This year, something surprised me: ceramics were everywhere. And not the kind I expected.

Clay that plays

I grew up associating ceramics with restraint, honoring the material, its original colors and textures, minimalism as a form of respect for clay. Beautiful, but quiet.

What I saw in the Promises section was the opposite of quiet.

The booths that stayed with me:

• EDJI Gallery — Philippine d'Otreppe
• Double V Gallery — Maximilien Pellet
• C+N Canepaneri — Deng Shiqing & Holly Stevenson
• Galerie Bao — Nguyễn Duy Mạnh
• Chiguer Art Contemporain — Abdelmalik Berhiss & Pitseolak Qimirpik
• La Peau de l'Ours — Rémy Pommeret

Gallery after gallery, I felt the same thing: these artists are enjoying themselves. There's humor, lightness, something almost childlike — and I mean that as a compliment. You can feel when someone had fun making something.

What this generation gets is that ceramics is a shape shifter. It can become anything. No rules about what it has to look like or mean. They've grabbed that freedom completely — not to be provocative, but because it's genuinely joyful to work that way.

I left believing in this medium more than ever.

This year's theme, Babel, was about art and language, the meaning of signs, what travels across cultures and what gets lost along the way. As a Japanese contemporary artist based in Paris, thinking in Japanese and making work in French, this is just my daily life. Having a space at the fair that reflected that felt like a small gift.

More than half the artists in the Promises section were women. As an emerging Japanese woman artist, walking through it felt like something had shifted — not just on paper, but in the room itself.

I came down from the balconies full and a little tired, the right kind of tired after a good fair. It was time that made me think about clay, and about my own work too.

More about me

As a Japanese ceramic artist working in Paris, my practice is grounded in personal and cultural experience.
Growing up in Japan, I was shaped by unspoken rules around behavior, gender, and emotional expression. These underlying structures continue to inform my work and are central to my approach to contemporary ceramic sculpture.

[https://tinyurl.com/3vfrm6pf]

Substack、Instagramでは最近の陶芸作品やプロジェクトをご覧いただけます。
Substack [https://erimaeda.substack.com/]
Instagram [https://tinyurl.com/3jy6wzv9]
Studio in Paris: MONO [https://maps.app.goo.gl/uWE9iiXhiW3b12r37] mono - atelier de céramique