Ben Lignel

Professor for Design Related Sciences

Prof. Ben Lignel
© Baptiste Lignel, Otra Vista

A piece of jewelry for thinking with: Raise (10 dollars), 2019

Steel, gold, acetate, paint; diameter 56mm; edition of 25

to: Craft, the MACR program’s second student publication, June 2021. Printed carboard box containing 39 digitally printed postcard, a set of stamps, and a folded Riso-printed foreword with an illustration by Alaskan artist Sara Tabbert.

Research in heat and clay: cooking a clay-wrapped beef chop in ambers, September 2023

Hospitality training: Ben Lignel and Guillaume Granjon prepping and serving food to 200 visitors at the 2024 Paris11 Ceramic Festival © Milo Lignel.

Tool for cooking: a donabe [hotpot] for 4 people in flameware clay, 2025

"Hello! My Name is W", 2006-07 photographed by Elene Usdin

Dental gold and dental ceramic. This set of brooches was created in response to the ANTI-WAR medals project initiated in 2003 by gallery Velvet da Vinci, in San Fransisco.

Ben Lignel is a potter, craft thinker, educator, publisher and maker living in Montreuil (France), the town of which Paris is the suburb. A jewellery maker and advocate for 25 years, Lignel co-curated also known as jewellery (2008), MirrorMirror (2011), Difference and Repetition (2013), Exposé (2017), Medusa, Jewellery and Taboos (2017) at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and Tableau Vivant (2018) at the Pinakothek der Moderne / the Design Museum, Munich. Alongside his curatorial practices, he started contributing essays and op-eds to magazines and publications in 2006, and became a member of Think Tank. A European Initiative for the Applied Arts, in 2009. He was the editor of Art Jewelry Forum between January 2013 and December 2016. During his tenure, Benjamin oversaw the publication of more than 350 essays, reviews and interviews, and edited three books, including the first book-length study of jewelry exhibition-making. He is guest teacher at  Alchimia (Florence), the Akademie der Bildenden Künste (Nürnberg), HDK-Valland (Gothenborg), and was core faculty at the M.A. in Critical Craft Studies (Warren Wilson College, Swannanoa), from the program’s inception to its end. While teaching there, he was responsible for the editing, design and production of each graduating cohort’s publication, including the program’s last retrospective publication project (www.themacrpapers.com). He is a founding member of both la garantie, association pour le bijou, an organisation dedicated to producing discourse on contemporary jewelry, and of the Knowledge House for Craft, a southern hemisphere think tank dedicated to understanding the ways in which craft lives in our contemporary world. After a twenty-year career in jewelry, Ben has steered his creative interest towards making ceramic cookware. 

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