Dora Stanczel: Porcelain as a Language

Trained in digital arts and holding a master’s degree in fine art, Dora Stanczel first explored sound and video installations before realizing that her creative process needed to be physical. She craved that tactile, visceral exchange — both conflict and affection — with the material. The revelation came when she touched clay for the first time, and porcelain swiftly claimed her heart.
Since then, she has never let it go. She built her own studio, installed kilns, and devoted years to mastering this complex, demanding substance. In that journey, Dora Stanczel forged her artistic language — one that is unmistakably her own.

Dorą Stanczel, artiste contemporain, porcelaine, sculpture

The Material That Doesn’t Allow Deception

For Dora Stanczel, porcelain is far more than a medium. It’s a living matter, temperamental and proud, endowed with memory and resistance. “You can’t cheat porcelain,” she says. “It remembers your mistakes, and they resurface in the firing.”
This challenge is what fascinates her. The process demands mastery of fire, anticipation of transformations and distortions — a dialogue that only perseverance can sustain.

For years, she pursued flawless, functional pieces, only to find herself unmoved by perfection. Gradually, she turned toward the unexpected — embracing accidents, bending errors into deliberate gestures, transforming imperfection into expression.

porcelaine de Limoges, artiste contemporain, Dora Stanczel, porcelaine plissée

Belonging to the family of high-temperature ceramics, porcelain requires precise expertise. Kaolin, quartz, and feldspar are rare and precious; their recipes, closely guarded secrets. In Limoges, where kaolin is becoming scarce, its value — and the importance of reinventing tradition — is amplified.
Unafraid of defying convention, Stanczel doesn’t strive to preserve tradition as it was. Instead, she stretches it, reinterprets it, and finds renewal in the tension between mastery and freedom.

lampe sur mesure en porcelaine rétro éclairée , Dora Stanczel, artiste contemporain

Staying in Motion, in the Moment, in the Material

Her early utilitarian work quickly evolved into a more sculptural, artistic practice. Nature and history feed her imagination: the Atlantic coast, with its World War II bunkers, inspires her “porcelain shelters,” where the solidity of form meets the vulnerability of matter.
The ocean’s rhythms — waves, spirals, currents — echo through her draped compositions, a recurring motif she has explored for nearly a decade.

Porcelain allows her to explore fragility, transparency, and the subtle play of light. Her fragmented, rippling pieces, such as those exhibited in New York, resemble creative puzzles — each fragment must find its place within a whole. The process is unpredictable, often precarious. The material, simultaneously heavy and ethereal, enters into dialogue with other elements — stone, metal, or glass — as in her collaboration with sculptor Tiziana Scaciga, where porcelain “gives wings” to stone.

Sculpture en pierre et porcelaine, Dora Stanczel et Tiziana Scaciga

Minimalist in her use of colour, Stanczel celebrates the luminous purity of white. Light and volume become her pigments. Her research has led to a distinct signature — one that embraces imperfection and co-creation with matter itself.
Through her masterclasses, she shares this intimate knowledge: understanding the material not to dominate it, but to discover one’s own rhythm and language within it.

The ocean continues to inspire her forms, but so does sport. Kayaking has taught her balance and vigilance — qualities she carries into her creative process. For Stanczel, solitude is not isolation; it is concentration, the silence necessary to meet the material as if encountering a new being each time.

Sculpture en porcelaine de Limoges, artiste contemporain, Dora Stanczel

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Main douce, sculpture en porcelaine de Limoges, art contemporain, Dora Stanczel

Facing Emptiness and Solitude to Create Meaning

As an entrepreneur taking her role seriously, Dora Stanczel has known solitude and resistance, yet she persists with a language that is both strong and delicate. Her recent amphorae reflect on time, civilisation, and the soul of objects — metaphors for the female body, tributes to endurance and grace.

For Stanczel, to create is to resist:
resist the disappearance of ancient skills, resist repetition, resist conformity.
Every day she experiments, recycles, reinvents — ensuring that porcelain, fragile only in appearance, remains a living and resolutely contemporary language.