Eri Maeda

Eri Maeda is a Japanese contemporary ceramic artist and sculptor based in Paris, working primarily with hand-built stoneware ceramics and photography. She creates vividly colored stoneware sculptures that transform everyday domestic objects into surreal, creature-like hybrids, works that sit at the intersection of craft, critique, and dark humor.

Her practice explores rebellion against social norms, gender expectations, and the subtle codes of behavior shaped by upbringing and culture. Through hand-built ceramic sculpture and staged photography, Maeda examines how visual language shapes desire and perception. Her signature "monster" figures absorb and confront toxic societal messages, acting simultaneously as satire and resistance.

Combining pop colors, glossy glazed surfaces, and unsettling details, Maeda's stoneware sculptures balance humor with critique. She blurs the line between the familiar and the absurd, inviting viewers to question everyday rituals and hidden social pressures. Her work has been shown across Paris, Tokyo, London, Milan, and internationally.

Influenced by her background in branding and marketing, Maeda brings a sharp visual intelligence to contemporary ceramic art. She accepts studio visits by appointment in Paris and offers custom ceramic art commissions. Portfolio and catalog available on request.

Artist Statement

Eri Maeda is a Japanese contemporary ceramic artist based in Paris. She makes monsters.

Not the frightening kind or not exactly. Her monsters are hand-built stoneware sculptures that look like the things already sitting on a bathroom shelf: a comb, a mirror, a lipstick, a cake. Maeda takes these everyday domestic objects and pushes them, scales them, fuses them with flesh-like forms, glazes them in vivid, oversaturated colors and asks: what are these objects actually doing?

Contemporary ceramic art has a long history of using the vessel and the domestic object as a site of social commentary. Maeda works within that tradition, but comes to it also from branding and marketing, from an understanding of how images construct desire. Her “monster” figures absorb the language of consumer culture and reflect it back in distorted, unsettling form. This is what it means to make contemporary stoneware sculpture that challenges societal norms: looking closely at the objects handed to women, and asking what was being handed along with them.

My Practice / How I Work

Every piece begins by hand. Maeda works in her Paris studio using hand-building techniques — coiling, pinching, and sculpting stoneware clay into forms that resist the symmetry of the wheel. Stoneware allows for a wide range of surface effects — from matte, skin-like textures to high-gloss, almost plastic-looking finishes. The contrast between these surfaces is central to her aesthetic: something that looks soft but is hard, something that looks commercial but is entirely handmade.

Vivid, saturated color is a deliberate choice in Maeda’s ceramic practice. She uses brightly colored glazes — pinks, reds, yellows, greens — not for decoration, but as a critique. The colors reference cosmetics, packaging, toys, and consumer culture. Applied to surreal sculptural forms, they create objects that feel both seductive and unsettling.

Maeda draws her forms from the domestic sphere: combs, mirrors, cakes, flowers, lipstick. These are objects coded as feminine, objects assigned to women’s bodies, women’s rituals, women’s spaces. By enlarging them, distorting them, and fusing them with organic and monstrous forms, she transforms everyday objects into surreal sculptures that critique the gendered expectations embedded in ordinary life.