Meet the Maker Paying Homage to Women Artists with Ambitious Ceramic Sculptures
Ahead of her return to Maison & Objet, Luisa Maisel shares insight into her dynamic vessels and stirring installations
Luisa Maisel wasn’t looking for a new direction when she began making colorful porcelain vases during the Covid lockdowns. At the time, the New York-born artist had spent decades in France creating ambitious ceramic sculptures and installations. The new vessels, titled “Colorful Confinement,” became a much-needed source of joy during an uncertain time. “I had always made vases, but I never took it very seriously,” she admits. “But I got into the porcelain and the color, then just went nuts.” She also found that, in making vases, she rediscovered the “beauty, aesthetics, and style” of functional pieces.
Maisel was convinced to show “Colorful Confinement” at the French trade fair Maison & Objet. “I thought I’d sell my 12 vases and go home,” she recalls, laughing at the memory. “I didn’t realize that people could order. By the time I left, I had sold 60.” She also debuted Bubblegum, a series of vases built from hundreds of colorful ceramic balls layered one by one, joking that this particular collection gives her “a chance to sit down,” versus standing as she sculpts.
Born in New York and raised on Long Island, Maisel pursued photography and graphic design before moving in her twenties to Paris, a city she had first visited the as a college student studying abroad in London. “The art, the culture, the architecture all felt incredibly inspiring and seductive,” she recalls. “I always felt there was a French part of me, as though this was where I was meant to be.”
A visit to the Museum of Modern Art with her then terminally ill mother changed everything. There, she encountered Judy Chicago’s landmark installation The Dinner Party, a large triangular banquet table with each place set for a different woman from history and mythology. The impact was instant. “The monumentalism, the feminism, the beauty, it was so full-on,” she says. “At that moment I said to my mom, ‘That’s what I want to do. I want to be a ceramic artist.’”
Graphic design paid the bills, first in New York and later in Paris, where she also taught at Parsons School of Design. But as computers transformed the profession, Maisel found herself drawn instead to the tactile pleasures of making. “I really just wanted to paste and glue and build and get my hands dirty,” she says. A one-year residency at the Cité Internationale des Arts, which provided both a studio and an apartment, gave her the time and freedom to experiment—and ultimately the confidence to devote herself to ceramics full time.
For Maisel, clay has never been tied to a particular end design. Over the years, she has created large-scale installations, portraiture, and politically charged sculpture. “My serious work was asking myself a question and answering it through ceramic form,” she says.
The vases of Colorful Confinement may be lighter in spirit, but they are birthed from the same creative impulse. Each vessel is built slowly by hand, layer by layer, guided by instinct. “I use no machines; I think with my hands,” Maisel says.
Her ongoing installation Another Dinner Party pays homage to Judy Chicago’s groundbreaking work while celebrating the women artists who have shaped her own creative life. “It enables me to be very pluralistic in style and color and form,” she says. “Each time I change inspiration to the artist that has influenced me, so Yayoi Kusama would not look anything like Niki de Saint Phalle.”
Maisel spends several months each year working outside France, most recently during extended residencies in Japan and China, where she has explored high-fired porcelain and new glazing techniques. “It’s this huge laboratory,” she says. “I keep diving into these new territories and figuring out new stuff.”
That spirit of experimentation continues today. In addition to returning to Maison & Objet this fall, she is developing two new collections—including a series of ceramic wall pieces for Révélations Paris next year. “Clay is like painting in sculpture,” she explains. “It is functional and decorative and has so many different capacities. The variety is phenomenal—that’s what got me hooked.”