Handmade ceramics are white hot right now

Handcrafted, small-batch ceramics are everywhere these days. They can be spotted in the stylised pages of Kinfolk, Apartamento and other cult magazines, often paired with organically-shaped cutting boards and sun-dappled potted succulents. Vogue even devoted two pages in last year’s September issue to a new wave of independent ceramists.

And among certain creative-minded millennials, ceramics have replaced jewellery and furniture made from salvaged lumber as the craft du jour, with access to choice kilns as a status symbol to be flaunted on Pinterest and Instagram. “There is beauty in imperfection and having items that are really handmade,” said fashion designer Steven Alan, who populates his boutiques with textural American and Japanese ceramics in neutral hues.

While terrariums, Edison bulb light fixtures and fixed-gear bicycles have all enjoyed moments of demarcating cool, handcrafted small-batch ceramics are suddenly the accessory of the moment. Just as those earlier trends represented a tactile, down-to-earth counterbalance to our sped-up, technology-centred world, the rejection of factory-produced sameness in dinnerware and vases reflects a desire to get back to something more essential.

We want to know where our free-range eggs come from and where our coffee beans are grown and roasted. We also want the vessels we use to consume those things to embody a deeper story about craftsmanship and creativity. “People are looking to have their humanity reflected back at them,” said veteran potter David Reid, a co-founder of KleinReid, a ceramics company in New York. “People are moving back from slick and stainless steel to something warmer.”

Creating from scratch

For interior designer Kelly Wearstler, who recently teamed up with ceramist Ben Medansky on a line of tableware bedecked with golden cubes, ceramics imbue a room with a sense of purpose. “Something made of the hand is so special, it inherently adds soul and dimension within a space,” she said.

Robert Sullivan, the contributing editor at Vogue who wrote the magazine’s ceramics article, said that ceramics are popular now because they are “among the most obviously and literally handmade things.” “It’s an antidote to all the electronics,” he added.

Julie Carlson, editor-in-chief of the design website Remodelista, has chronicled the rise. “It’s entwined with the farm-to-table movement,” she said. “It is this desire to know the origin of what is in your kitchen. It’s hard to keep track of them,” she added of new ceramists. “In the beginning, it seemed like there were just a few, but now there are more than we can cover and more than we can invite to our markets.”

Perhaps nowhere is this more notable than in Brooklyn and Queens, where there are no shortage of makeshift pottery studios, clay-throwing classes and boutiques that resemble the homepage of Etsy.

Natalie Weinberger, 29, made the jump from the nonprofit world to being a full-time ceramist a year ago, and she shares a basement studio in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, with nine other upstart ceramists. “Demand for learning ceramics is crazy right now, and it’s hard to get your hands on studio space,” said Natalie , who makes vessels with striking sculptural forms, often with textured clay speckled with black volcanic sand.

The launchpad for many New York potters has been Choplet, a ceramics studio and teaching space that French-born Nadeige Choplet opened with her husband, John Lego, in Williamsburg in 2005. “When I started, I had four wheels and I was only giving two or three classes a week,” Nadeige said. But the space grew into a buzzing claymaking hub with more than 30 wheels along with a separate studio called the Williamsburg Ceramic Center.

There is growing evidence that ceramics is moving beyond mere hobby to budding creative career, along the lines of artisanal chocolate. “I have a lot of people who happened to start a little Etsy account and then got wholesale orders,” Nadeige said. “They get their own space and quit their jobs. It’s happened a lot.”

One of the success stories is Forrest Lewinger, 31, whose studio, Workaday Handmade, produces cups with marbleised glazes, earthy bowls with hand-carved geometric patterns, and ivory-coloured vases with a confetti-like spatter of blue. His career began with a small, shared booth at the Williamsburg Renegade Craft Fair in 2012, which blossomed into a string of wholesale orders. Soon, Barneys New York and Anthropologie came calling. Now, he has two part-time employees in a shared studio in Queens. “It’s gotten to the point where I have to have someone else in here to help me, just to keep up,” Forrest  said.

The giant of the new ceramics movement is Heath Ceramics in Sausalito, California, which to the world of clay is what Stumptown is to coffee or Brooklyn Brewery is to craft beer. In 2003, husband-and-wife designers Robin Petravic and Catherine Bailey bought and restarted the company, which was originally founded in 1948 to produce midcentury modern housewares. The couple edited the collections of dinnerware, decorative objects and tile, and introduced new pieces and artist collaborations while maintaining a focus on handcrafted production. Along the way, they transformed Heath from a niche company, which did about $1 million in sales in 2003, to a globally known outfit with 200 employees that sells about $20 million in products a year.

Last October, it received a National Design Award from the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum. But like a lot of emerging potters, the couple says one of the original reasons they were attracted to ceramics was that it allowed them to oversee the design process from start to finish. “The nice thing about clay is that you can do it all, and it doesn’t take a lot of resources to build it up,” Robin said. “You can’t buy a forge to make metal things. But clay and a wheel, or a mould, and a kiln, is pretty straightforward.”