Fleur H.A. Reboul has always loved making things by hand. The Frenchwoman holds a master’s degree in fine arts from the University of Toulouse-Mirail and worked as a prop maker in Paris for several years before moving to St. Louis with her husband in 2015. Since relocating, Reboul has found new ways to employ her talents. She divides her time between her home studio and Intersect Arts Center in South City, where she first learned about ceramics in 2019.
How did you get started with ceramics? I met Emma Vidal. She’s French also, and she used to manage the studio here [at Intersect]. She was teaching how to do hand-built sculptures. I took the class, and she taught me all about how to put together two pieces of clay, drying times, consistency, basic stuff like that. Then the pandemic started, and I asked Sarah Bernhardt, the executive director here, if I could borrow a wheel. So my partner was doing Zoom meetings upstairs and I was in the basement all day, playing with mud. I watched a lot of YouTube videos and worked on the wheel until I had something usable. People were enthusiastic about [her works], so I continued.
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So this is pretty new for you. Yes and no. I never used clay, but I was a prop maker and did a lot of sculpture. I used to work in the movie industry and make whatever was needed, like fake foam cakes that actors could throw over and over. I liked it a lot, because they would say, We need this, we need it to look like that, but it cannot make any sound, and it cannot break, and it needs to behave this way. You have to adapt every technique in order to make something that looks realistic on the screen.
That was in France? Yes. I lived six or seven years in Paris making props for music videos, movies, and TV shows. I worked for the French version of Mythbusters, making props and stuff. [After moving to St. Louis,] I found a job prop-making at a haunted house. In France, we don’t have [the same] culture of haunted houses, so it was funny to discover this.
Do you like horror movies and scary stuff? No, I hate it! But I’m very good at distressing stuff. It’s fun to make. You have to think of all this twisted stuff to do to make a zombie-looking puppet very scary.
What is your process for making ceramics? Most of the things that I make will be a mix of hand-building and the wheel. Basically, you can only do a cylinder on the wheel. You can go very fast doing that, but then you have to trim it, refine the shape, maybe make a foot. And then, if you need to attach anything, it needs to have a certain consistency, because when you throw [on the wheel] it’s very gooey, so, you need to let it dry.
It looks like you mostly use black and white in your pieces. It’s not really only black and white, because I make them overlap. I’m really looking for something that is controlled but also has a certain degree of letting go—like a controlled accident. It’s creating its own thing. That’s why, at the beginning, I wanted only to use two glazes and just push it and try to find ways to make it interesting. When I glaze, I try to be fast and not think too much. If anything is happening, like, I’m accidentally putting my finger on something that is not dry enough, I just let it go and fire it anyway. I really try to keep myself from fixing things. I just let things happen; I think it’s creating a lot of character. If you want something that has no trace of human hands, it’s possible, but it’s not what I do.
What are you working on right now? For spring, I want to do more plant-related stuff. I started a series of terra-cotta pots based on German artists Hilla and Bernd Becher. They did photography of industrial objects, and one series is about water towers. It’s always the same type of photography: black-and-white, with a very neutral sky. So you kind of compare the different shapes for an object that is supposed to serve the same purpose. I get inspiration from that. I make plant pots that serve the same purpose, but I see if I can adapt the shapes. It’s like a little challenge for me, trying to push the shapes a little bit further but keeping it practical.
