On Cellophane et Vaseline, we often invite tattoo artists.
This time, different material.
No needles, no tattoo machine, no skin.
Clay, cups, wordplay, exhaustion, a lot of humor, and a pretty radical way of staying true to yourself.
Nadia is Terre d'Oxymore. A ceramicist from Grenoble who makes pieces by hand, often cups, often without handles, often with lines that hit hard.
"I don't like people."
"I shit on fascists."
"You drank the Virgin."
Funny objects. Absurd objects. Sometimes political. But never lukewarm.
She produces everything alone. She sells fast. Too fast, even.
At Christmas, she goes up to 90 hours a week. She refuses shipping, does not want to grow just for the sake of growing, and sometimes pauses the gallery just so she can breathe.
We talked with her about ceramics, success that is hard to carry, scarcity, authenticity, working in a cold basement, family, words, and this simple idea: going all the way with who you are.
First, what's the difference between a ceramicist, a potter, and pottery?
Nadia: Ceramicist means you work with clay. Not just pots, not just on the wheel. You can hand-build, sculpt, use different kinds of clay.
Potter is more connected to throwing, making round shapes, pots, things like that.
I work with several clays: pyrite-speckled stoneware, white stoneware, black stoneware, sometimes porcelain. I have several materials in the studio.
How long have you been working with stoneware?
Nadia: About six years.
But with Covid, the real start was more around the end of 2021. Before that, there were experiments, ups and downs, research.
At first, you're looking for yourself. You try things, you see what people like, what feels like you.
And then there was that moment at Christmas.
I don't really like Christmas, so I made a "Merry fucking Christmas" cup. It was the first one that sold when I opened the stand.
That's when I thought: actually, I can be myself.
I don't have to make flowers if I don't feel like it. I can offer something that really looks like me, and there are people who get it.
Is that when Terre d'Oxymore found its voice?
Nadia: Yes. I think so.
From the moment I saw that what my brain produced, my hands could make, and that it spoke to other people, I allowed myself to keep going.
Sometimes I think: "No, this is too much, it'll never work."
And then it does.
People also need messages. They don't always want a pretty, polite, neutral object. Sometimes they want to show up at Christmas with a "Merry fucking Christmas" and put it on the table.
Do you have phrases that became bestsellers?
Nadia: "I don't like people" works really well.
"I shit on fascists" too.
And one that surprised me is "You drank the Virgin."
That one comes from a family joke.
For years, I used to say to my kids: "Did you see the Virgin?" And my son understood it as "Did you drink the Virgin?"
He only discovered much later that it wasn't that.
So I made a cup with a Virgin inside. When you drink, you are literally drinking the Virgin.
With you, inspiration really comes from everywhere.
Nadia: Yes.
From the table, the kids, conversations, words, mistakes, misunderstandings. Some phrases just come out like that, and I think: that could become a cup.
But I also check a lot.
I look to see if it's not already the title of a film, a song, a T-shirt. I don't want to reuse a phrase that already belongs to someone.
People sometimes tell me: "You should make Kaamelott quotes."
But no.
That's not mine.
It feels like you could sell a lot more. Why do you refuse shipping?
Nadia: I tried.
When I lived in Chartreuse, I had to go down to Grenoble to drop off the parcels. It took time. And time is something I already don't have enough of.
A normal production week to stock the gallery is 40 to 50 hours.
At Christmas, I go up to 90 hours a week. No weekends, no breaks. I start at 4:30 or 5 in the morning, and I finish around 7 p.m.
At that point, adding parcels, packaging, tracking, messages, it's just impossible.
Ninety hours a week is huge. How do you handle it?
Nadia: During peak season, my husband handles a lot.
The kids, school, the house. We organize the calendars around that. Between September and December, he knows it's better if he doesn't have a big deadline, if possible.
I don't touch the washing machine anymore, or the dishwasher.
I cook, that's more or less the one family thing I keep.
When I'm there in the morning, the kids think I'm sick.
It's hard, but it's also a privilege. I know there are craftspeople who struggle to sell.
Sometimes I almost feel ashamed to say that I work too much because things are going too well.
You even paused the gallery for a while.
Nadia: Yes.
Because I needed a real timeout.
I wanted to be able to go for a beer with friends without thinking about the impact it would have on the next two days. To have lunch with a friend. Go away for a weekend. Visit a university with my son.
I thought the in-between period would be simple: just the gallery, not too many events.
But even that takes a huge amount of time.
And I need to have a life beside it.
Your workshop is a basement in Chartreuse. Is that part of the myth?
Nadia: Mostly it was the only available place when we came back from Italy.
It belonged to an elderly Franco-Italian couple, and at the start it was more of a barter arrangement than actual rent. We helped them with shopping, wood, fruit and vegetables.
There are advantages.
I hear the owl at 5 in the morning.
There are also downsides.
No toilet.
So sometimes, it's outside, in the snow.
In winter, it can be 5 degrees in the workshop. I can put the heating on for three days and reach 11 degrees. It's not insulated.
But that's where I work.
You produce alone. Have you never thought about taking someone on?
Nadia: No.
My way of working isn't standardized enough for that. I already have trouble managing myself.
Taking someone on would create so much stress upstream that I wouldn't even want to go to work anymore.
And also, as long as I don't have a toilet, I can't really take someone with me.
Still, the demand is there. People even send other people to come and pick up your cups.
Nadia: Yes, that happens.
People come with a list on their phone: one "I don't like fascists," one "Not messy at all," three "You drank the Virgin"...
Except I never have everything.
I don't produce six copies of 140 messages. I bring down what I have. I can post a photo of what comes out of the kiln, people see what's arriving, and they come.
But I don't put things aside.
Otherwise the 40 cups I bring down would all be reserved before they even arrived.
There's a sense of scarcity around your work.
Nadia: Maybe.
But I don't feel like I created it as a strategy. I'm just alone. These are my hands. I can't produce more than I produce.
When people say "that's the price of success," I struggle with that expression.
I already can't understand why there's so much demand. To me, it feels huge for being "just a ceramicist."
You have quite a strong relationship with the people who come to buy.
Nadia: Yes.
One of my aunts once said to me: "People don't just come to buy a cup, they want the full experience."
They want to talk, see who I am, laugh, understand the story behind the objects.
At the stands, my husband is there too.
Because people kept asking him if he was the one making the cups, he started replying that he was just there to sell his body.
So I made him a sign.
I like the stand to feel alive.
There can be beers, sweets, cakes, absurd challenges. One year, I made Christmas decorations shaped like butt plugs.
"Merry Plugmas," that kind of thing.
You're very present on Instagram, but you refuse commercial collaborations.
Nadia: Yes.
Sometimes people offer me collaborations to monetize.
But no.
I'm the person who skips ads. I don't want to impose that on the people who follow me.
What drives me mad is the inconsistency between what people say and what they do.
If I say I want to stay small, stay myself, I'm not going to launch collaborations that add five more things for me to manage.
It's a very concrete form of authenticity.
Nadia: Yes.
I'm not trying to play a role.
When I leave the workshop, I sometimes have clay everywhere. I go for a beer like that. I go to a parents' meeting like that.
Dads showing up with paint on their work trousers, nobody cares.
Me, if I have clay all over me, people look at me weirdly.
And if I'm too clean, people say I don't look enough like a potter. If I'm too dirty, they say I could make an effort.
So, well.
You talk a lot about words. It feels like language is almost as important as clay.
Nadia: Yes.
At home, we often pull out the etymology dictionary. We hear a word, in any language, and we want to know where it comes from, how it was built.
Words are also a material.
I take them, twist them, put them on a cup.
Sometimes it's crude, sometimes political, sometimes absurd, sometimes family-related. But it has to sound right.
You say classes often allow ceramicists to survive. Could you do that?
Nadia: I've done some before.
Workshops, clay aperitifs with friends or people I knew.
But today, I don't have the time anymore. People ask me every week if I do training sessions.
But after 10 or 12 hours of work, the energy I have left, I want to keep for my family.
Not to teach a class and come home wrecked.
Classes require real organization.
You need materials, several wheels if you're teaching throwing, pedagogy, a regular rhythm.
It's not just: "Hey, I'll do a workshop."
If you had to give one piece of advice to a craftsperson who wants to stand out?
Nadia: Go all the way.
Be yourself all the way.
Offer something different.
There is a huge amount of ceramics out there. As long as you haven't found what sets you apart, what truly represents you, you remain interchangeable.
My signature is the message.
For others, it might be a bird, a face, shapes, colors, butts, whatever.
But when people see the piece, they need to recognize the person behind it.
It's like tattooing.
You don't compare someone who does full color with someone who does realism. They're not the same worlds.
What matters is the signature, the personality, the human being behind it.
So to find your cups, people need to be patient.
Nadia: Yes.
Instagram only. No website. No shipping.
You have to wait, watch what comes out of the kiln, come when it's possible. And accept that what you wanted may not always be there.
It's frustrating, I know.
But that's also what allows it to remain me.
In the end, what is Terre d'Oxymore?
It's a ceramicist working alone in the cold, sometimes too much, sometimes to the point of exhaustion.
It's an artist putting table jokes, political anger and language accidents onto everyday objects.
It's an entrepreneur who could grow, but prefers keeping her hands in clay rather than in shipping spreadsheets.
It's also a fairly simple, and fairly rare, lesson: you don't have to please everyone.
You can even dislike people, and still end up touching a lot of them.
As we say here: happy firing.
