Sylvian Meschia was born and spent his childhood in North Africa and the forms, colours and sensations that surrounded his early years are clearly perceptible in his work today. With no formal training, he learnt his skills as a ceramist with the native craftsmen of Tunisia, then in the workshops of artists from Southern France, before establishing his own studio in the rolling countryside south of Toulouse, where he lives and works today. His Mediterranean origins drew him naturally to working with the soft earthenware and warm, ochre shades traditional to the area and he has forged a distinctive mode of expression through his constantly evolving and original decorative techniques.

His early work involved renewing and revisiting a local style: slip clays coloured with cobalt, iron and copper oxides are applied in successive layers to a raw, hand-thrown pot to produce a swirling, marbled effect, reminiscent of the traditional earthenware of Roussillon. At the same time, he was developing and perfecting his brushwork, inspired, like many ceramic artists, by Japanese pictorial and calligraphic techniques. This led him initially towards bold, simple brush- stroke designs on hand-thrown pieces, then ultimately to working on a flat surface, with increasingly elaborate use of paintbrush, bamboo, imprinting and engraving.

The tiles he thus creates are conceived as small ceramic pictures, the culmination of his pictorial design work, first on paper, then on clay, applying his craftsman potter’s techniques. He feels that the austere, flat, square format allows much greater freedom of graphic expression than an already expressive thrown or moulded form. Some are combined to form larger wall panels for integration into architectural designs. The inspiration is again clearly Mediterranean: the use of white, set against contrasting colours, with splashes of blue and light and shade effects created through the slightly textured surface.

Another influence has also been at work in the creative process – the artist’s long standing love for the written word. An avid reader of poetry and prose, with an innate sense of textuality, he would frequently note down or memorise snatches of text, culled here and there from his reading, with no other aim than to fix a fleeting evocation or savour the sounds and rhythms.

These citations have gradually found there way onto the clay, some meaningful, others simply suggestive, always setting up echoes in the ear and eye.

His more formal calligraphic style, freely adapted at the outset from Moorish designs, has evolved to become an individual repertoire of signs and figures, elaborated over time and now entirely his own. Here, from his original two-dimensional engraving, his technique has become increasingly refined and ambitious, culminating in large, hand-thrown pieces of impressive dimensions: free- standing jars, urns and lidded caskets, whose rough, mottled, finely engraved surfaces seem to speak to us from beyond time.