Born in 1958 in Toronto, Canada
Lives and works in Fontainbleau, France

The ceramics of Kristin McKirdy have the playfulness, precision, and unidentifiable function of toys and proto-scientific artefacts. The Toronto-born, Paris-based ceramicist is known for her flat-cut geometric volumes in which dull and rough skins conceal sleek, gleaming, and colourful cores. Extremely skilled and precise with her glazes and textures, she carves and sculpts into the surface, scratching the outer layer as if it were exposed to a rough environment. Next to these worked surfaces, the inner core appears even more fragile and precious, an almond in its shell or the marrow of a bone.

Borrowing from the visual language of still life, McKirdy offers a filtered reality, where sizes and proportions are shifted, containers are full, and fruits are hard as stone, where colours and textures are carefully balanced. She proceeds with variations around simple themes and games of combinations, repetitions, and compositions. Fruits, icebergs, rocks, eggs, bowls, mortars, cups, bottles, and architectural elements are the many typologies from which she draws her inspiration, interpreted and rendered as sculptural objects.