Seven of the Most Beautiful Ceramic Pieces to Shop Today

In a past life, ceramicist Shane Gabier was the co-founder and co-designer of the fantastical, beautifully imagined ready-to-wear line Creatures of the Wind. Lately, Gabier has been revealing a new talent. “The move into ceramics was really organic; I'm a longtime collector and started to work on the wheel a couple of years ago,” he explains. “This led to some experiments with hand building, and from there, it grew quickly into the ideas that would inform the current body of work.” The pieces are inspired by Brutalist architecture (see: the proportions), late ’60s to early ’70s psychedelia (those colors), Japanese graphic design from the early ’80s, and Memphis design. “The things that inspired me in fashion are the same things that inspire and inform my work in ceramics as well,” Gabier says. “The same explorations that have been significant are still important to me. I focus on color, composition, texture, and re-contextualizations.” The result is rich and unexpected, like Gabier’s personal favorite, the two-piece rainbow vase set commissioned by Maiden Name.

When Irish fine artist Camilla Hanney discovered ceramics and in particular, porcelain, she found her true love. “It has a sense of daintiness or fragileness to it, and I love that quality of porcelain,” she explains from London where she is based. “It’s very kind of genteel, and I like subverting that. I like to try and make works that use those delicate qualities and grab those associations, but then try and flip them.” This might mean her series of Virgin Marys, standard bearers of purity at first glance, turned on their heads through the addition of sly snakes and ram horns. Another piece, Feast (2020), takes the form of a towering three-tiered porcelain cake, overflowing with decadence, laced pearls, and connotations of desire. It looks like a classic wedding cake at first, until you notice the frowning face on the upper-most tier—even with all this, she is still unsatisfied. The works engage with themes of sexuality, consumption, and the cultural construction of womanhood, twisting the sanctified with the occult, while exploring the female body as the site of constriction and rebellion. Several of Hanney’s pieces sit quite beautifully, and subversively, within the home, like the shapely porcelain pots (ideal for holding candles or small plants) originally commissioned by the late Lee Alexander McQueen’s Sarabande Foundation, where Hanney had a residency.

Once a shoe designer who studied at Antwerp’s prestigious Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Berlin-based artist Laura Welker has been busy carving hundreds of NSFW candles this week. Her Hot Legs—handcrafted, slightly “witchy” heeled boots doubling as candleholders—have also had a strong impact. “It is a little bit of a fetish object, [but] also obviously shoes,” Welker reflects of their appeal. “Men have these fascinations for shoes; leather and especially high heels have something very powerful at the same time. The Hot Legs are something [of a] caricature. They look a bit like they’re drawn. I make them myself. Each pair looks slightly different. I think that is also what attracts others. It is something handmade.” Her new project will be in an entirely different category, also adding something special and curious to the home. “I got really into sports during the pandemic,” muses Welker, who is experimenting with kettlebells transformed into Venus de Willendorf–esque iron goddess sculptures. “It’s a little bit of this lifestyle equipment that is a really taboo word in the art world, but I think this is a little funny,” she comments. “I’m very excited about that.”

Designer Erin Beatty, one-half of beloved shuttered womenswear line Suno, has found a new calling in these challenging last few years. “I’d always seen [the waste of the fashion industry] and never thought on it too deeply, but suddenly with the closure of SUNO, the birth of my second child, and a troubling political climate, I became acutely aware of the fact that if I wasn’t actively trying to make our industry better, I was simply part of the problem,” she explains. “I wanted to see if it was possible to create products that felt unique, covetable, and guilt free.” The result of this exploration is Rentrayage, a project named for the French word meaning “to mend,” inspired by a children’s book about Louise Bourgeois. Beatty’s endeavor includes beautiful upcycled ready-to-wear, as well as specially commissioned design objects for the home made from preexisting materials. Many of the works are best categorized as folk art. “[They are] artists without any of the pretense,” she says. “Art that somehow feels like it was a mandatory expression or a utilization of materials found nearby.” One highlight? A series of Nicola Fasano cake plates, crafted from plates and bowls that break in the kiln in the Fasano family’s Puglia studio. “They mend them back together painting around the cracks creating stunning pieces that can be used either for serving or wall art,” Beatty says. “I love how these pieces celebrate the flaws of the piece, turning them into something unexpected and beautiful.”

If you live in Australia, you might already be familiar with Marloe Marloe, the elegant, minimalist homeware line from ceramicist Marloe Morgan and her partner, James. “It’s for women who want to be able to really stylize their whole lives,” Morgan muses over Zoom from Queensland. “The inspiration is built on what I feel there is a need for people and what they might want to connect to—really wanting to create pieces that allow people to connect to their space and the rituals they are performing within their everyday lives.” The latest pieces reference local nature—the dusty beige of Gold Coast landscapes, the way the rain settles on a single leaf, the vibrant blue of Australian waters. There is an ease and a graceful simplicity to them, much like the organic colors and textures the vessels, vanity cases, and candles (try a leather amber scent) pay ode to.

In her work, Russian and French artist Apollinaria Broche fuses the fairy tales of childhood with abandoned and forgotten spaces she discovers today. Playgrounds, cemeteries, and brothels become the sites of modern-day fantasy. A mystical turquoise lake in remote Russia—magical at first glance, but the product of chemical waste in real life—takes on the character of a long-lost lonely and ignored creature. The trees become paranoid like scared humans, growing CCTVs from their branches; myth and reality converge in ceramic work and installations. This vision, a merging of fairy tale and adult life, has recently inspired a ceramic collaboration with Acne Studios for their current collection. The pieces are sculptures for the home: beloved animals transformed into mystical pastel creatures, much like the imaginary friends or stuffed animals of childhood. It’s a playful, imaginative offering, ripe to give inspiration in any room.

“I’ve always been doing illustration since I was very young, and I always drew naked people,” London-based French illustrator and ceramicist Laetitia Rouget says. “I guess I tried to rebel a little bit.” Her playful, lighthearted plates in dreamy pastels have captured the hearts of fashion’s tastemakers, including Camille Charriere (who collaborated with Rouget and Evie Henderson of The Yellow World on her tableware debut). Her current favorite is Peachy, a stonewall dinner plate revealing the curve of a woman’s backside. Future pieces will include vases and lamps. “I can never predict completely what my artwork is going to be. That’s what I love about creativity,” she suggests. “It’s the process. It’s sometimes something magical. You feel it. You cannot comment if there will be designs, shapes, colors, contrasts, whatever. Just when you see it, you know inside that it’s right.”