BLUE GUARDIAN, glass and ceramic small sculpture

One of a kind sculptures in glazed stoneware and blown glass. Arnauld Le Calvé re-enchants the material by creating a dialogue between the elements: earth and air, density and fragility, past and modernity, to give birth to anthropomorphic forms evoking archaic and futuristic guardians inhabited by an inner strength.

Arnauld Le Calvé pierces the material and blows the glass into it hot, thus forming coloured, translucent, smooth and shiny bubbles. They bring light, contrast with the roughness of the sandstone and become the gazes of his totems. Blown glass, on the other hand, embodies the breath of life, the transformation and fragility of the living.
“My creations take up both the codes of art brut and those of symbolic art. By working these shapes like cocoons, I wanted to highlight the clay and its different textures, I didn’t add any colors, or very little, in order to leave the different clays I used bare” – Arnauld Le Calvé

Arnauld Le Calvé (born in 1977 in Dreux) is a sculptor who creates a dialogue between clay and glass. Trained as a glassmaker through the traditional apprenticeship system and later as an assistant at CIRVA in Marseille, he became a self-taught ceramicist and developed a unique technique: blowing hot glass directly into grogged stoneware. Based in the Dordogne and inspired by animist beliefs, he has been developing his *Totems* serie s since 2020—stoneware guardians with volcanic-textured surfaces and luminous blown-glass eyes, works that are at once archaic, futuristic, and poetic.