A Love Letter to Clay and Fire
I'm Sebastian, a ceramicist working out of a members' studio in Brooklyn, NY. My relationship with clay started small — two classes and the ceramics club at Kingsborough Community College — but it didn't take long before I was hooked. There's something about working with your hands that reorders your attention completely; hours disappear at the wheel in a way they don't anywhere else in my life. I still remember the first time a piece came out of the kiln looking like something I hadn't fully planned for, and realizing that feeling — half pride, half surprise — was going to keep pulling me back.
That early curiosity has grown into a practice I take seriously, spanning both wheel throwing and hand building, with stoneware as my material of choice across its full range — from refined and controlled to raw and unpredictable. I currently fire in a cone 10 reduction gas kiln, and I care a great deal about the technical side of the work: how a glaze breaks over an edge, how reduction changes a surface, how form and firing schedule have to be worked out together rather than separately. None of that rigor feels like a constraint to me — it's the language I use to have a conversation with the material, one where I don't always get the last word.
The deeper pull, though, is historical. I'm drawn to the quiet weight of Chinese Song Dynasty bowls and to the raw, unglazed honesty of contemporary Japanese kurinuki carving — two traditions, centuries and cultures apart, that both treat restraint as a kind of mastery. Studying them has changed how I see my own pots: less about adding, more about knowing what to leave alone. There's a kind of humility in that lineage that I find myself chasing as much as any technique.
Working in a shared studio has shaped this practice too, in ways I didn't expect. There's a rhythm to being around other people who are equally consumed by the same stubborn, humbling material — comparing glaze test tiles, trading notes on a kiln load that didn't go as planned, borrowing someone else's hard-won trick for centering a wider bowl. Ceramics can feel like a solitary pursuit from the outside, but for me it's been the opposite: a way into a community built entirely around getting a little better at one very old craft.
Looking ahead, I'm working toward wood, soda, and ash firing, chasing the kind of surface only an atmosphere kiln can give you — where the fire itself becomes a collaborator, leaving marks no glaze recipe could plan for on its own. It's a bigger commitment than what I'm doing now — longer firings, more hands, more that can go wrong — but that's part of the appeal. I want to keep making work that asks more of me technically while staying close to why I started: the simple, still-surprising pleasure of turning a shapeless piece of clay into something that holds water, holds light, and holds a little bit of history in its surface.*