Sybil Layous is a Lebanese designer-maker working in clay. Living and creating in Paris, she specializes in slow-crafted, handbuilt forms, utilizing traditional coiling and pinching techniques without a wheel to create sculptural design objects and vessels.
With a formal background in fashion visual communication, Layous spent her early career in Paris before returning to Beirut to launch Flor:ish, a floral project that deepened her engagement with organic form. She began experimenting with clay in 2017, and the medium gradually became integral to her career. Following her move back to Paris in 2023, she dedicated herself entirely to ceramics.
Her earlier work drew inspiration from the natural world through abstract, biomorphic forms. More recently, Layous has marked a focused return to the vessel form, exploring ancient archetypes, hybrid anatomies, and the ceremonial weight of negative space, a direction most fully realized in her Interstice series. Her emphasis on balance and imbalance, symmetry and asymmetry, often monitored through a mirror during construction, remains a defining framework for her approach to composition.
Although conceived as standalone sculptures, Sybil's pieces are guided by a sense of utility. She seeks to create objects that have the power to fire the viewer's imagination, bringing forth forms that feel ambiguously familiar. She believes that "functional art" has the power to connect with people on an emotional level, transforming the spaces it inhabits.
In a world driven by digital processes and instant gratification, she reasserts her position on the role of traditional craft within contemporary design. She chooses to work with a familiar medium in modern and engaging 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 an ongoing dialogue between artistry and function, craftsmanship and design, contemporary expression and tradition.
