The English artist works with porcelain paste to give it an organic, dynamic appearance, building and deconstructing the abstract forms that animate her surfaces.
Nothing predestined Olivia Walker to work with porcelain, which she discovered after graduating with a degree in English history and literature, during a summer job at a craft gallery in her native Devon. Enjoying handling and discussing the ceramics, she quickly became interested in their production, eventually deciding to make it her profession. Fifteen years later, in her studio in Dartmoor National Park, her style flourishes on her shaped pieces and wall panels, where scales seem to emerge from the material like moss taking root on rock.. “I mainly use Limoges porcelain, for its softness and qualities once vitrified. I love its feel, smooth like double cream in slip form and very pleasant to throw on the wheel, and I like the possibility of sanding it to obtain a fired surface as smooth as a pebble, and of coloring it to create very pure tones.” explains the artist. She particularly appreciates this latter process, frequently carrying out color tests by integrating pigments and oxides into the porcelain paste, and delighting in discovering the results, sometimes unexpected, when it comes out of the kiln.
Inspired by the surrounding nature, the ceramicist typically works intuitively: she allows the material to develop and find its own form as she shapes it on the wheel, before incorporating her porcelain tesserae, radiating like mushroom gills or aligned like strata of schist. On the walls of her perfectly polished and symmetrical vessels, she creates an element of chance, removing part of the material only to partially rebuild it with tesserae, filling the crevice with a skillfully constructed anarchy, akin to that of a living organism. In her metaphorically titled series nests (nests), the pure forms disappear entirely under the fragile scales, repeatedly huddled together and drawing their strength from their protective circle.
Following the same principle as the vessels, the wall panels are gradually being eaten away by the encroaching vegetation of the porcelain tiles. The contrast is striking between the simplicity of their geometry and the smooth flatness of their tadelakt surface—a lime plaster whose color harmonizes with that of the porcelain—and the seemingly anarchic movement of the tesserae, unfolding in three dimensions in different directions. The fragility of these delicate fragments is contrasted with the monumentality of the whole. While small pieces can be completed in one or two days, the execution of such panels, which can measure up to nearly two meters and require tens of thousands of tesserae shaped by hand and positioned one by one, can take the studio team several months. "I think the time spent on the pieces is part of their strength, and I hope that those who look at them are aware that these are objects of love, that have been thought through, and carry time deeply embedded within them.", confides Olivia Walker.
Custom-made and designed to play with shadows, the wall panels come in a multitude of forms: individual or unfurling a cascade of porcelain across several interconnected panels, they stand at the center of a wall or surprise the eye in a corner. Their metaphorical profusion of organic life is echoed in other works where the porcelain scales are structured into branching patterns. Unfurling in relief against the tadelakt background, they evoke the way plant branches divide as they grow. Maintaining this principle, Olivia Walker recently designed a diptych for the Lallier champagne house, transposing the notion of "nature in motion" into its budding rose-colored branches, an evocation of terroir and craftsmanship. In the same spirit, she also conceived a series of small porcelain bowls bristling with scales.
Among the artist's upcoming projects is her first black mural, destined for a volcanic landscape: Iceland. Using a low-oxygen firing technique, she also plans to explore a range of different colors and effects on certain stoneware pieces, which she works with alongside porcelain. Her new works in progress will be presented at her first solo exhibition in South Korea in the spring of 2026.
First solo exhibition at Gallery LVS
B1F Jasmi Building, 33 Dosan-daero 27-gil, Gangnam-gu, Seoul (South Korea)
Spring 2026
Rachel Hoile
