Sybil Layous is a Lebanese designer-maker working in clay. She specializes in hand-built forms using traditional coil, slab and pinch techniques to create freestanding design objects, sculptures, and vessels.
She started experimenting with clay in 2017 and the medium gradually became integral to her work. Today, she focuses solely on her ceramic practice after going back to Paris in 2023, where she currently lives and creates.
Her work still draws inspiration from the natural world: gestural contours, sensuous curves, and biomorphic shapes. Her emphasis on light and shadow, balance and imbalance, symmetry and asymmetry, has been a consistent framework in her approach to composition, blurring the line between the spontaneous and the intentional.
Although conceived as stand-alone sculptures, Sybil’s pieces are at times guided by a sense of utility. She seeks to create objects that have the power to fire the viewer’s imagination: they are neither representative nor geometric, but are uncannily familiar. She believes that ‘functional art', has the power to connect with people on an emotional level, to transform the spaces it inhabits, and to elevate the home into an expression of a life well lived.
In a world of digital technologies and shiny surfaces, she reasserts her position on the role of traditional craft in the realm of contemporary design. She chooses to work with a familiar medium in modern and exciting ways, aware of the historical and present-day discourses that underpin it.
The result is a series of objects that are entirely handmade and slow-crafted. Playful and ambiguous, they suggest a dialogue between artistry and function, craftsmanship and design, modernity and tradition.
