Aurore Piette

Aurore Piette calls herself an artisane de la mer, and the phrase is a method rather than a mood. Working between Bordeaux and Meschers-sur-Gironde, she builds a craft out of what the Gironde estuary leaves behind: dredging sediments that are still treated as waste and that her studio reads as a local resource.

Those clays are pushed through three families of technique — raw earth for coatings, cob and bricks; fired clay for tiles and bricks with raw or textured finishes; and vitrified clay for high-temperature glazes. The output moves between object design, interior architecture, scenography and transmission workshops. With Esther Bapsalle she developed FUSION, a glaze made only from estuary sediment and horticultural and wine-growing ashes collected in Entre-Deux-Mers, rewarded and shown at Paris Design Week Factory and the Biennale Amour Vivant in 2023.