Sophie Manessiez

Sophie Manessiez is a Franco-Canadian artist whose practice sits at the intersection of wall sculpture, installation, and contemporary craft. With a background in visual arts, communications, and several years in event production, she has been exploring ceramics for nearly twenty years and has worked as a professional artist since completing her diploma in craft arts techniques at the Cégep du Vieux Montréal in 2021.

Working slowly, piece by piece, she shapes porcelain forms that she assembles into wall-based and sculptural compositions where each unit retains its singularity while participating in a larger whole. What appears delicate reveals, through accumulation, an unexpected resistance. What seems ordered gives way, in the in-between, to singularities, variations, distinct presences.

Her works invite the eye to slow down, to move through, to inhabit space differently. A member of the Conseil des métiers d’art du Québec and selected for the Homo Faber Guide 2026 by the Fondazione Michelangelo, she maintains an artistic presence between Europe and North America, from her studio in Shefford, Estrie.

Artistic Statement

I work porcelain as a sensitive structure, slowly shaping modular units whose assembly explores what connects, sustains, and makes a whole possible beyond its apparent fragility.

The repetition and subtle variation of forms establish a rhythm from which singularities emerge. What seemed fragile in isolation becomes, through accumulation, a material in its own right, open, like a system in the making.

Porcelain, treated not as a ceramic object in the traditional sense but as a structural element, finds in the bond its assembling force. My works inhabit the wall and space as territories of relation, where balance is perceived in the in-between, through the slowness of gesture and the force of the bond.