As a designer and maker, Anna Tou explores the dialogue between craftsmanship and design through this medium.
With a background in Typography and Applied Arts from École Estienne in Paris, she settled in Brussels in 2009, where she has lived and worked ever since. Specialising in high-temperature clays, her work is rooted in material experimentation and formal research, resulting in poetic yet functional pieces in stoneware and porcelain.
Anna creates made-to-order pieces and develops bespoke projects in collaboration with restaurants, interior design boutiques, or architects. Deeply committed to knowledge sharing, she also runs workshops for a wide range of audiences in Brussels.
Photo @ Lucile Dizier
Member of the association BeCraft representing the Applied Crafts of Belgium, Anna is also a member of the Belgian ceramists' collective ArtBoland the international community Homo Faber Guide since 2025.
Between design and craftsmanship
Anna Tou is currently in residence at MAD Brussels, the Center of Fashion and Design of Brussels. For the next two years, she is developing a dedicated collection of collectible objects, such as lamps, mirrors, vases and furniture. Her approach explores ancestral techniques, artisanal processes, and the prototyping of pieces conceived for contemporary design.
Anna loves to highlight the crafts and ceramics, honoring both tradition and contemporary expression. Atelier Tou is a living space devoted to clay. Through a sensitive and committed approach, she weaves connections between design and craftsmanship while guiding the studio with clarity and vision.
From typography to ceramic
With a strong foundation in Applied Arts, Anna Tou deepened her creative practice through Crafts Arts studies in calligraphy and typography at the École Estienne in Paris. In 2009, she moved to Brussels, where she founded a graphic design studio specialising in lettering and visual identity, working closely with publishing houses and design agencies.
While working as an art director in Toronto in 2016, she discovered the captivating world of ceramics, a turning point that sparked a new artistic path. Back in Belgium two years later, she trained for several years alongside professional ceramicists and continued her education at the Brussels Academy of Arts. In 2022, Anna opened her own ceramic studio in Forest, where she now creates tableware collections.
In her practice
A collector and scavenger of unusual tools, Anna draws inspiration from archaic objects to create contemporary collections that reflect organic, living forms shaped by hand in a gentle, slow process. She enjoys exploring material and the unexpected — anything that contributes to making an object unique and precious. Each piece features variations in texture, relief, and dimension. As a result, no two pieces are ever the same.
In her work, Anna merges ancestral techniques of ceramics and tattooing — body art dating as far back as 3200 BC. She shapes and marks the clay as one would mark skin, creating pieces imbued with our collective memory and resonating with ancient rituals. Her background in calligraphy resurfaces in the linear work that highlights the seams of her pieces. Anna tattoos the skin of the earth, blurring the line between craftsmanship and the human body.
Stories of textures and living matter, stories of movement and falls, stories of mysterious interiors and undefined organs. A creative process centered on experimentation and the enhancement of imperfections. Allowing forms to emerge through modeling, the constraints of clay, and firing. Her practice generates its own shapes, which in turn create reproductible imaginaries.