In 1959, at the age of 23, Claudine Monchaussé moved to La Borne in the Berry region, a village that has been a centre for pottery since as far back as the 12th century. An autodidact, she discovered her craft independently and has continued to produce her work in La Borne ever since. Her material of choice is clay, which she moulds and shapes before allowing the kiln and the firing process to complete the work. From early silhouettes, she evolved towards more austere shapes shrouded in mystery and oscillating between spherical forms, symbols of fertility and protruding elements. For curator Joël Riff, “each work has its own address, a charge that emanates from it and which finds its own destination.” Claudine Monchaussé's work also attests to a kind of permanence, to a continuous transcendence that tends towards the sacred through its universality. Her sculptures have a way of imposing their presence, as if they were self-evident.

At La Verrière, a selection of some forty pieces attests to this interior quest. Claudine Monchaussé does not draw or sketch, but rather devises her forms as she shapes them in her studio. Each sculpture is thus the result of a process of emergence, one evoked by the title of this project: “Sourdre”, literally meaning “to spring" or "to surge", as would a plant from the earth. Since this is only Claudine Monchaussé’s second solo exhibition and her first outside France, the title also refers to the emergence of her work onto the art scene. “Sourdre” indeed represents a key moment of visibility for the ceramicist, whose work has long remained confidential. 

Curator Joël Riff has brought together a group of other artists alongside Claudine Monchaussé to enrich the public's experience. Brussels-based artist Nicolas Bourthoumieux (b. 1985) presents sculptures that complement those at the heart of the exhibition. Two major women artists who have marked the history of French sculpture, Marie Talbot (1814–1874) and Germaine Richier (1902–1959), are meanwhile represented respectively by an emblematic piece and an engraving. Idols by the duo mountaincutters (formed in 2012) punctuate the space, while sculptor Damien Fragnon (b. 1987) has authored a text on the nature of mineral waters from the depths of the earth. Gathered together beneath the skylight of La Verrière, each artist’s work can “spring forth”.