Gigi Wenger (Web Exclusive)

Mar 17
3 min read

Medium/Technique: Ceramics

Location: Québec City

Website/Social Media: https://www.instagram.com/mungibou/

Four colourful ceramic sculptures that look like little creatures with no faces. — Gigi Wenger, *Minis*, 2023. Photo by Guillaume D. Cyr.

1. How would you describe your art and artistic practice?

I’m a multidisciplinary artist (illustration, textile, photo, theatre design), who’s been concentrating on ceramics for the last 5 or 6 years. I’ll try anything once, figuring things out as I go along. Colour is my dada, whatever the medium.

2. How did you first get into ceramics?

In high school, early, before I discovered theatre. Loved staying in town, after school, going to meet my mom at her workplace, covered in clay. I don’t remember glazing or firing, just my hands, jeans, face, getting dirty, creating. Fast forward to 2018 when I started a 3-year college technical program in ceramics at the Maison des métiers d’art de Québec and never looked back. In 2023 I did a month residency at the Shaw Centre for Contemporary Ceramics at Medalta, Medicine Hat, Alberta.

Clockwise from top left: Bariolé 3, 2022, photo by Guillaume D. Cyr // Rabbit, 2023, photo by Emily Lewis // Murmur 1, 2024, photo by Guillaume D. Cyr // Murmur 3, 2024, photo by Guillaume D. Cyr

3. Your work is so whimsical and playful. You’ve said you find inspiration in “gritty urban landscapes and savage folktales” – what is it about these things that influence your work?

My inspiration is definitely urban, an abandoned parking lot in summer somewhere, weeds blooming peacefully. I like a pretty landscape as much as anyone, but I truly love living in the city, in my downtown, cruddy neighbourhood, where the river cuts the heat islands in two, where the graffiti runs wild and the weirdos wander. One foot on the pavement, on my bike, and the nightly sirens somehow reassure me. There are infinite stories to be told there. The familiar strange creatures I make out of clay are actors I imagine hiding under the stairs, behind the containers. They are rough and weird and full of magic.

An image of two unfinished ceramic sculptures that are in the process of being glazed. They look like little creatures with open mouths. — Process photo by Gigi Wenger, 2026.

4. Can you walk us through your creative process, from initial idea to sourcing materials to the physical act of making?

I rarely sketch ideas. There’s always a lot going on in my head, depending on what I’m reading or the music I’m listening to. I work spontaneously, quickly, and am totally not into perfection. I’m a hand builder, a coil builder, with several sculptures on the go at once, interacting with each other. I prefer red and dark clays and flashy coloured glazes with lichen and crater effects. I am not a patient person, so I don’t do many tests -- I’ll just try out a new glaze on a big piece and see what happens. I attack the glazing process like painting actually, with brushes and drips. Every part of the process enthralls me -- the rolling/building/smoothing of the clay coils, forms emerging; the bisque firing when all the pieces are the same dusty colour, textures obvious; the various/multiple glaze firings…

5. You studied photography and illustration, as well as set and costume design. How do those mediums and fields influence your ceramic work, if at all?

There are so many parallels between these mediums and ceramics.

The thrill of discovery -- opening the kiln is like, in photography, seeing the image slowly appear in the chemical bath, the grain, the contrasts. Never knowing how it will turn out.

Getting your hands dirty, full of paint and oil pastels, creating textures, smearing colours. Letting the body take over.

Theatre design, especially lighting design, is playing with shape and scale and colour, with intensity and shadow.

Imagining the back story, asking what happened before/after, what did they whisper, why are they there….each oeuvre is just a captured moment, like a photo or a cinema still.

A multicoloured ceramic sculpture in the shape of an elongated anatomical heart. — Gigi Wenger, *Heart,* 2023. Photo by Emily Lewis.

6. Tell us about a favourite piece or collection you’ve created and why it’s so memorable.

The sculpture that got lost in the mail. Heart (above) was one of my Medalta babies, a different shape, inspired by an old piece of machinery from the Bone Yard, where texture and colour neared perfection…. It’ll forever remind me of that dry, warm prairie September and the freedom there. Maybe one day someone will discover that box in a warehouse somewhere …

7. What have you encountered in your career so far that readers (or other artists) might find surprising or unexpected?

Every one of my sculptures has a soundtrack. If only you knew what they’re dancing to!