As an MFA student at ECAL, French-born artist Cécile Mestelan got into making small-scale sculptures with plaster for practical reasons — cost and ease of transport — but stuck with the material for more poetic ones: “It’s a very powerful and open material to work with; you can do so much with it, from modeling and sculpting to engraving,” she says. She became so taken with the medium that she traveled to Portugal for a ceramics residency with Vista Alegre and never came back. Now Lisbon-based, she makes and exhibits sculptures that she either simply carves from a block of plaster or slip casts in plaster molds. She characterizes the pieces — which will be on view starting June 18 at Atelier Concorde in Lisbon — as “false archaeological objects … sharp and unusable weapons or jewelry, objects with unknown functions … suggesting a possible utopian civilization.” Check out more of her work below.