Clay's Ascension into Fine Art and Architecture
The material most people treat as the hallmark of a hobbyist is quickly becoming the missing ingredient in how the most beautiful spaces are being made.
Clay is being reclassified. For most of the last decade, it shared a bunk with other decorations. It was just a vase near the window, a bowl on the table, the handmade “thing” you keep from your kid because you love them, or the offhand pickup once the room is otherwise finished. Those days are done. Not your kid’s clay thing, of course. But ceramics, overall, has evolved into a considered art and a form of architecture. You can't just treat it as the object placed in a space anymore. You have to respect it as an object and material you build your space with, and around.
Top Designers Keep Arriving at the Same Material
Over the past year, we’ve interviewed designers working in registers that barely overlap. Maye Ruiz, a colorist in San Miguel de Allende who treats a wall the way a painter treats a canvas. Sara Alexander of The Scale Collective, who moves between art and interiors, with the training of an architect on the same project. And Malek Alqadi, who left Hollywood residential work to build off-grid in the Mojave desert. None of them know each other. None was asked about ceramics. Yet all three arrived there anyway. Ruiz mentioned mid-conversation about the ceramic history of San Miguel de Allende; Alqadi described the ceramic lamps he chases as objects that read "like a sculpture, not like a lamp"; Alexander described a Miami project where a ceramic mantel nearly became something far stranger and far better.
When people that unalike reach independently for the same material, it isn’t a trend on its own, but it is a signal we should be paying attention to.
To understand why now, just look at what people are shouting they’re tired of. We endured a decade of interiors sanded into a consensus that produced rooms you can explain in thirty seconds and forget just as fast. Clay refuses that smoothness even at the level of its physics because no two ceramic pieces can be made identical to each other. Even at scale, it carries variation as a default, a thumb pressed harder here, a glaze pooling darker there, or a rim leaning a half-degree off.
Clay Still Demands a Human Hand
One of our brand ambassadors, the Toronto-based, Syrian-Filipina sculptor, Tamara "Solem" Alissa, describes it beautifully: "Clay is an intuitive medium. Its characteristics change based on its environment, and every batch is different. Your hands become your eyes." Alissa came to ceramics through unconventional means. She began as a biomedical student at the University of Toronto and was a human anatomy teaching assistant with no formal art training, who was a drop-in at a pottery class taken as relief. She describes her practice as the preservation of time. There’s a poetic, almost romantic layer inherent to ceramics because it demands personal infusion. However, there’s also a mechanical aspect that can’t be ignored. Clay has to be wedged, formed, dried, watched, fired, and it can emerge from the kiln transformed or ruined. The combination of both characteristics makes clay unique as one of the last materials that, even at scale, still can't fully outsource the hand. And it's not just Alissa who is creating a stir in the art and design world for her ceramic pieces. Around her sits a wide field of artists who also mold and shape clay in ways worth paying attention to:
Ronald Rael
Professor Ronald Rael of Berkeley and Co-founder of Emerging Objects works with clay as a construction material. He interplays modern and ancient practices through the use of 3D printing technology to create these new structures from one of the oldest materials known to man. Earlier this year, he keynoted the Gardiner's Symposium on emerging technologies and ancestral building practices.
Elif Uras
Dividing her time between New York and Istanbul, Uras works primarily in Iznik, the town that gave its name to the tile lining Ottoman mosques for four centuries. She makes stoneware and stone paste figures finished in gold luster using the ceramic capital's own techniques to make it contemporary.
Simone Bodmer-Turner
Bodmer-Turner built her studio on vases drawn from Meso-American stirrup vessels, shapes as much by negative space as the clay itself. Since then, she's ventured into furniture, lighting, plaster walls, fireplaces, and site-specific installations. Bodmer-Turner trained through residence in Japan and Oaxaca before founding her practice in 2018.
Jolie Ngo
3D-printed vessels being hand-painted can sound like a contradiction, but it's not. Born in Philly, Ngo is a RISD and Alfred-trained artist whose work evokes silk lanterns and whose gradients recall rice paddies seen from above. As an artist, she's collected by the Carnegie and the Museum of Arts and Design.
When we spoke to Maye Ruiz earlier this year, she reminded us of the anthropological nature of clay. Ruiz traces it the way a person traces a culture's history through generations: the ceramics of Marrakech came from Spain, Spain's came from the Middle East, the Middle East's came from China, and Mexico absorbed all of it and made it something else. In Dolores Hidalgo, close to where she calls home, clay is a working inheritance with techniques passing hand to hand because that’s how culture survives and has survived for thousands of years. "We are migrants," she says. "A mix of a journey of generations of people moving." Alissa says the same thing but from the other direction: ceramics has always been, in her words, "a demarcation of time and proof of civilization,” how we know what people ate, how they honored their dead, what routes they traded along, what stories of greatness were worth remembering.
The Art World Is Finally Catching Up
Ceramics were never just decoration and this year, we're seeing more regions around the world embrace this truth. Ceramic Brussels drew 70 exhibitors from 30 countries and more than 19,000 visitors in only its third year. Toronto's Gardiner Museum expanded its ceramics fair from ten days into a twelve-week platform. In Jingdezhen, the thousand-year-old porcelain capital of China, this summer's international congress staged an exhibition titled Breaking Through the Earth, centered on clay, architecture, and public space. You have galleries collecting ceramics as sculptures, and collectors are treating them as priceless paintings. Everywhere you look, ceramics are being elevated to higher heights.
At Residence Supply, we work mostly in brass, alabaster, marble, and travertine, materials chosen because they evolve with time rather than resist it. Clay belongs to that family. Where brass records the person who lives with it, clay records the person who made it. One material remembers the owner. The other remembers the maker. A brass switch beside a ceramic wall; a ceramic lamp on a marble surface, it’s just a conversation between materials with different memories and exchanging stories at different speeds but with similar depth.
By 2029, Ceramists Will Be Part of the Architectural Team
So here’s the bet I’m willing to make.
By 2029, the ceramicist graduates from being the product provider in the interior design phase to being chosen during the architectural stage, named right beside the lighting designer, and hired before the room is even styled. Especially as we search for innovative ways to build homes and community spaces that can withstand the weather changes we’re experiencing in real-time.
Now, I could be wrong. These days, movements dissolve into trends pretty quickly, and the algorithm will find the ceramic lamp, flatten it, overexpose it, and make everyone tired of the thing they thought they'd just discovered after a good six months.
But, I’m still willing to put all chips on clay because a major driving force behind its ascension is the rebellious stance taken by both consumers and creators to embrace objects, techniques, and people who prove the value of being human. People are exhausted with sameness, disposability, and rooms that look assembled by taste but never touched by a life well lived. And so far, the answer people keep reaching for, independently, on three continents, is one of the oldest materials there is that holds the shape of a hand, and is least capable of lying about it.
Come back in 2029 and let me know if I called it right on this one.
Additional reporting from MFG's conversations with Maye Ruiz, Sara Alexander, and Malek Alqadi. Photography by Fadi Salib. Courtesy of Tamara Solem Alissa.
