info@desiredisaster.com
@Desire.Disaster
ABOUT
After graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Central Saint Martins in London in 2018, Hannah Doucet developed her practice through travels that nourished both her technical skills and her relationship with materials. After more than ten years between London and Mexico City, she returned to Paris and founded her own studio in 2024: Désordre Céramique. Here, the production space is conceived as a place for research and the circulation of gestures that goes beyond a simple manufacturing context. Her studio unfolds as an extension of her body and mind, a living territory, both personal and collective, where the fundamental tensions of her work are replayed.
At the heart of her practice, the gesture precedes the form. Far from seeking a closed result, Hannah Doucet strives to preserve the living part of the process: the trace, the momentum, the accident. Ceramics, drawing, and sculpture coexist as states of the same movement. Her drawings, often left open, refuse resolution and unfold like continuous chaos, a writing destined to persist and change, perhaps without ever being completed.
This logic also permeates her approach to objects. The artist diverts familiar forms from their expected function in order to shift their symbolic meaning. Three regimes coexist and intertwine: an intimate disorder, composed of everyday objects charged with emotion; a social disorder, made up of immediately recognizable, almost banal forms; and an imaginary disorder, where more abstract figures emerge, drawn from shared stories, fragmentary memories, or mental images. These sets are not hierarchical: they come together in a logic of superimposition, producing an unstable world where scale and function become blurred.
In this universe, disorder is neither decorative chaos nor a simple formal motif: it constitutes a structuring principle. It acts as a force of openness, capable of cracking the classification systems that organize our perception. In this respect, her work dialogues with and draws inspiration from a history of excess in contemporary art—from the raw intimacy of Tracey Emin to the strategies of shifting the gaze in Sarah Lucas. In Hannah Doucet's work, however, this disorder is never quotational: it is lived, incorporated, replayed in the material.
Her installations prolong this tension. They do not seek to discipline the gaze but to reveal its instability, to maintain a precarious balance between organisation and collapse. A tissue, a trivial form, an almost insignificant fragment: transposed into ceramics, it acquires a new density, as if the material were fixing what would otherwise dissolve. The gesture then becomes an act of retention, not to freeze disorder, but to preserve its sensitive charge.
In this personal cosmology, objects circulate, contaminate each other, reinvent themselves. Disorder ultimately becomes a way of resisting overly restrictive frameworks, but also of imagining other possible arrangements. Through this unstable accumulation of forms and narratives, Hannah Doucet sketches the contours of an expanding world, a space where objects transcend their function, and where chaos, far from being a loss, becomes a force for transformation.
text: Marco Valentini
Curation: Marco Valentini
Management: Dora-May Libakou
Artistic Direction: Corneille Sangi Vimpy
Photography: Hervé Bossy and Emma Vovk