Marine Wallois

Hello everyone, my name is Marine Wallois, I am a ceramist in Biarritz.

For 3 years, I have dedicated a large part of my time to imagining and making useful and durable everyday objects: dishes, vases, which I imagine being handled, filled, emptied, decorated with flowers as often as possible. I work with stoneware, a resistant and easy-to-maintain clay because I don't want my ceramics to stay in a cupboard for fear of breaking them or being too lazy to clean them by hand!

My mission as an artisan is to promote a responsible mode of consumption: investing in a hand-made cup implies that we attach value to the objects. This encourages you to pay attention to the details, to what makes it unique, to the trademark of the craftsman who created it. It's a real process and for me it can completely change the experience of using the object. When I go to a restaurant now I systematically look under the plates or cups to see if they were made by hand and this greatly influences my tasting.

Then it's a virtuous circle, I don't find it coherent to eat industrial food on a pretty homemade plate.

In this sense, I am currently deepening my reflection on the eco-responsibility of my production. I train myself to know the origin of the raw materials that I use in my workshop. Indeed, even if the attraction for working the earth is similar to a need for connection to a natural material, it is all the same about powders of rocks and metals whose extraction, cooking and processing release are not without impact on the environment.

I want to be able to work with the most neutral and least toxic materials possible so that my activity, even on a very small scale, is aligned as much as possible with my convictions.

My eco-responsible commitment is mainly expressed today through my consumption choices in everyday life: my food, my travel, my clothes... Gradually I am moving towards more awareness and sobriety.

The trigger was the arrival of my two children and the questioning (among many others!) of the consumption model and the values ​​that we wanted to pass on to them. With them we also spend more time observing nature, I have become more contemplative and sensitive to the beauty of my environment and it is a great motivation to stop burning everything.

And then of course, the accumulation of scandals linked to fast fashion, the horror of intensive farming, water shortages, soil impoverishment, micro-plastics everywhere etc, etc, it becomes complicated to remaining in denial, not feeling a little responsible and not changing anything in your habits.

Furthermore, changing my life to work in the craft industry meant, for me, earning less and therefore necessarily having more reasonable consumption... Honestly, it also helped me quite a bit to have the trigger to stop buying n whatever ;-)

It's not a linear path , I'm still very far from a decreasing lifestyle and I often feel assailed by temptations, which creates a lot of cognitive dissonance. But I'm getting into the habit of being less compulsive in my purchases and it gives me great pleasure to invest from time to time in pretty, sustainable, artisanal things and from committed brands, which allow me to feel more coherent.