How to rework what already exists? In this workshop, we dive into the practice of slip casting with porcelain. Ceramic artist Octave Rimbert-Riviere welcomes us into his studio and guides us through the basics of this technique. We learn how molds are made, used, and transformed, before we begin casting and assembling our own pieces.

Rather than starting from scratch, we remix pre-existing forms: casting becomes a kind of sampling. Like open-source code, loops in music or fragments from the WWW, we borrow, cut, shift, and combine, creating new sculptural or functional objects from leftover shapes and shared structures. Along the way, we explore the behaviour of porcelain, its flow, fragility, and strength, and reflect on how open-source thinking in craft can foster more circular, connected, and experimental forms of making.

Octave Rimbert-Rivière

Octave Rimbert-Rivière (Frank, 1988) is an artist focusing on ceramics currently living and working in Amsterdam. His sculptures are like a marriage between pottery and new technologies. They cross-over, mash-up, code-switch, trans-mutate and counter-craft without hierarchy of process or material. Marie Béchetoille: “Octave Rimbert-Rivière’s work is the result of unlikely chimerical gatherings: accumulations, juxtapositions, experimentations with scales and inversions. Artisanal refinement meets the mechanics of mass industrial production while the triviality of everyday objects is combined with artistic and popular references.”