Carole Touati - founder, ceramist & art director for RECONSIDER -

Reconsider was born in 2018.
I've been working in fashion for over fifteen years, as a consultant and art director. Swept along by digitalization, social networks, ultra-connectivity and ambient acceleration, I felt the need to do something with my hands to breathe a little and, something difficult, let go of the screen.  I've dabbled in drawing, painting, sewing and designing clothes, and found a certain satisfaction in it, but it was the day I took my first pottery course with a Japanese ceramist in Barcelona - where I've been living for 25 years - that something really clicked. It was as if I was connecting with my childhood self, with my innermost temperament. The calm, the very slowness, the diligence, the freedom to create a piece from A to Z, with no intermediaries, won me over. I've been practising ceramics for over 7 years now. Last year, I set up my studio in Chissey-en-Morvan, Burgundy, where we live half the year.

Vases, bowls, plates, sculptures - my pieces are all unique. I use stoneware and porcelain. These techniques allow me to work with both classic shapes and more unexpected ones, which I link to my offbeat world by applying brightly-coloured glazes, adding handles made from recycled T-shirt thread, or ‘ugly’ handles, for example.
Objects always tell something about us.

I'm in search of a kind of harmony in the contrasts and the unexpected. I try to approach beauty from the angle of possible ‘ugliness’. In this way, I adopt a broad and loose concept of beauty, while trying to go beyond my own preconceptions.

Half of my life is spent in Spain, in Barcelona, where I share a studio with my ceramicist friends, and the other half of the year away from the world, in the Morvan, Burgundy, where I set up my own studio a few months ago.

I work in stoneware and porcelain using a range of techniques I learnt in Barcelona, and make my creations as I please. I'm passionate about decorative objects and sculpture, but I also like to dedicate myself to utilitarian pieces, always trying to make them poetic and emotional. I'm not afraid of colours, and I like to take risks when combining them. Earths, techniques, shapes, colours, textures and finishes are all words that allow us to create our own language.

I like to create pieces on the wheel and, without going through the tournassage process, finish them by hand. In this way, they acquire the precision of the wheel and the regular shapes it creates, combined with the poetry of a piece made by hand, without tools.

My miniatures, sometimes barely a centimetre high, are also made in this way.

My work has been exhibited in Paris at Galerie 3m2, at Milan's Design Fashion Week and in Tokyo at two Pop-Ups at La Forêt, Harajuku.

carole touati for reconsider — March 2024, Chissey-en-Morvan, Bourgogne, France. Carole Touati by Sandrine Rossit @sandrine.rossit

MORVAN SEASON is officially on! Reconsider ceramic workshop at Chissey-en-Morvan is finally ready. Floor has been leveled - tools don’t roll out and fall off the table anymore!- and walls have been insulated and painted. Wheel and kiln are set.