Anna Tou founded Atelier Tou in 2025 to offer a space of shared beauty, where hand and material engage in lasting dialogue. A space where Belgian artists, artisans and designers are showcased with a unique perspective, chosen for the poetry of their gesture.

Anna Tou aims to empower craftsmanship in the field of ceramics, celebrating both tradition and contemporary innovation. She leads the space with a sensitive and committed vision. Driven by her passion for ceramics, she weaves connections between contemporary creation and artisanal craftsmanship.

The human-scale space hosts a refined boutique, a production workshop, and a learning area open to all wishing to discover clay modeling and improve their skills.

Between ceramic and design

With a foundation in Applied Arts, Anna Tou deepened her creative practice through 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 and develops collectible objects.

About her ceramic work

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.