Today (24 April 2025) marks the opening of the second solo exhibition from French ceramicist Ludmilla Balkis at New York’s Guild Gallery. ‘Grasp The Mountains, Then Let Them Go’ showcases Balkis’ minimalist ceramic sculptures, which take inspiration from the pastoral surroundings of the Basque Country.

Balkis is inspired by the Pyrenean forests that surround her home and studio, and through which she hikes every day. She uses gathered materials: clay from the earth, stones as decoration, and sticks as tools. The ceramics exhibited in ‘Grasp The Mountains, Then Let Them Go’ also incorporate ferns, hay, branches, kaolin and pebbles. These pieces are elemental and earthy: the designer’s ‘tribute to the land’.

‘By paying homage to the place that has welcomed me – its craggy mountains and fertile soil – my work becomes an act of tactile acknowledgement,’ says Balkis. ‘Tethered to the territory where I live, to its topography, my work is a conscious endeavour to find oneness with the land.’

The sculptures are organic in shape, with many taking on Balkis’ signature ‘Hodei’ form, with wide mouths and columnar bases that expand into fluid canopies. The colour palette is bleached and blanched, achieved by drying and reducing materials to create pale layered glazes.

The designer manipulates the clay as much as she can without it collapsing – ‘pushing the limits of clay's potential’, in the words of Guild Gallery founder and curator Robin Standefer (of design firm Roman and Williams) – drying it in phases to prevent structural failure. It's a ‘humbling’ process, the designer says, and one which harks back to an earlier time: ‘The Basque mountains force the observer to return to a lost state of integrity, to act in accordance with the basic order of things.’

‘These infinite whites, these weathered textures, these open moving shapes, are an homage to the land. The soil. The mountains,’ she adds.

Balkis’ ‘back to nature’ approach mirrors the trajectory of her career: the designer initially studied fashion and art history in Paris, later working as a fashion designer at Celine with Phoebe Philo. However, she found herself drawn to a more fundamental sort of making, and began learning ceramics with Freya Bramble Carter in London in 2014. She moved from the big city to the Basque Country, thereafter adopting her minimalist, imperfect style.

In ‘Grasp The Mountains, Then Let Them Go’, the natural and domestic spheres collide. In the sleek surrounds of New York, Balkis’ work ‘[rehabilitates] the matter of the world’.