FLORENCE FERRAT

About the Artist

Florence Ferrat is a Paris-born artist now based in Connecticut, whose creative journey is defined by transformation, emotion, and material alchemy. A self-taught maker, she found her earliest inspiration in watching her father paint, and from those early years developed an aesthetic rooted in feeling and experimentation rather than pre-planned structure.

Her primary medium is ceramics, but she also works with painting and mixed media, building a visual language that thrives on imperfection, rebirth and the poetic potential of everyday materials. Even when a ceramic piece collapses in the kiln, or a painting turns out different than intended, she views those moments as the seed of something new—“beauty in imperfection,” as she says.

Growing up steeped in the rich culture of Paris and now thriving in Fairfield County, CT, Ferrat brings together a European sensibility and a contemporary American vision, creating work that is both accessible and subtly profound.

Artistic Practice

In Florence Ferrat’s work, clay becomes voice, paint becomes memory, and mixed media become the bridge between idea and felt experience. She doesn’t merely shape forms—she lets the material speak back. A ceramic piece may start with one intention, only to shift in the kiln, crack or collapse, and that very “failure” becomes the impetus for a new form. She embraces these material surprises as part of the creative path.

Her paint work engages color and gesture in dialogue with surface, and in her mixed-media pieces she often repurposes discarded or overlooked materials—industrial packaging, found objects, fragments of architecture—to interrogate transformation and value. For her exhibition RE:Packaged, she turned packaging destined for discard into sculptural forms that evoke movement, memory and reinvention.

Across all media, Ferrat’s visual language is universal: emotional, tactile, impermanent. She crafts forms that carry traces of time, decline, renewal—and invites viewers not only to see, but to feel the resonance of making, unmaking, and remaking.

Featured Exhibition at iO

WABI BRUTAL

May 2025 – September 2025

At iO Arts Center, Florence Ferrat’s solo exhibition WABI BRUTAL transforms the gallery into a laboratory of material honesty. In this show she presents ceramics, mixed-media sculptures and wall works that navigate the tension between the delicate and the rugged, the refined and the broken. Echoing the Japanese aesthetic concept of wabi-sabi—beauty in imperfection—together with the aesthetic of brutal materiality, the exhibition invites a contemplative encounter: a cracked ceramic, a reclaimed packaging piece, a painting with visible scars of process.

Visitors move through spaces where surfaces seem to speak. Where a collapse becomes form. Where discarded material becomes metaphor. WABI BRUTAL asks: What is value when the perfect breaks? What is beauty when the process is visible? The show aligns with iO’s commitment to multisensory, transformative art—and offers a profound engagement with material, aesthetics, time and emotion.

Alignment with iO Arts Center Mission

Florence Ferrat’s work resonates strongly with iO Arts Center’s mission to expand perception, honor process, and elevate the unseen. By treating material change—collapse, fracture, repurposing—as integral to meaning, Ferrat aligns with iO’s philosophy that art is not only what you see, but how you feel, how you engage, how you transform. Her focus on emotional authenticity, mixed media synthesis and the poetic potential of impermanence aligns perfectly with iO’s vision of art as experience, healing, and connection.

Artist Philosophy

“I see beauty in imperfection; I do not start over. From what collapses I build new forms. My art is not planned but felt, and the moment the material speaks, I listen.”