Pascale Girardin had been working in ceramics for nearly two decades, crafting dishware for the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts’ gift shop and the posh Holt Renfrew department store, among others, when she was commissioned to work on her first hospitality project—a 20-by-20-foot curved 3D wall mural at the Fin restaurant inside the Mirage in Las Vegas. The striking mosaic of overlapping glazed stoneware in soft green and yellow tones for the Yabu Pushelberg-designed space laid the groundwork for a lasting relationship with the Toronto and New York-based firm, and set the Montreal ceramicist on a new hospitality track—a welcome detour. “I like the energy of the large-scale pieces,” she notes. When finished, “The excitement has that grandiose feeling about it. I feel like I’m swimming in it.”
Since that project in 2005, Girardin has thrived by pursuing longterm relationships with high-end clients who respect the arduous and slow process of working with ceramics, which can take up to 30 months from start to finish. Her portfolio includes projects like the Four Seasons Hotel Las Vegas, where she was recently brought in by the in-house design team and Art Advisory to produce the Desert Breeze installation—an illusion of wildflowers blowing gently in the wind with nearly 500 florals, petals, and leaves handmade from white bone china inspired by those found in the Mojave Desert. Set as the backdrop to the lobby’s grand staircase, the goal was for it “to become a destination for celebration of life passages,” she says.
In March, she debuted three murals in Rockwell Group’s stylish redo of the Nobu Downtown in New York, including a showstopping duo of high-relief murals in the main seating area, comprising 3,500 individual ceramic pieces that resemble briquettes of charred wood. It was a “celebration of the handcrafted artwork,” she says. “We don’t always have clients who are as enthralled
with ceramics the way we are, but this was a perfect fit.”
With nearly 20 projects on the boards, Girardin is on something of a personal journey as well, pursuing her master’s in fine arts at the University of Quebec in Montreal, while also exploring performance art through ceramics. She wonders: “Can the process be the art itself, rather than the finished product?”
