Of Ceramics & Pottery

My heart beats for ceramics. I can not resist these pretty little handmade creations, borne out of a potter’s imagination and deft skills. Today’s feature is about three young ceramic / tableware studios, run by lovely women, who are creating magic from a lump of earth.

Tejashree Sagvekar Pottery

Tejashree, a graduate in Ceramics from Sir JJ School of Art and trained in Auroville, runs her pottery studio in Panvel, Bombay. She now teaches at her alma mater and also runs pottery workshops at various art schools and museums.What caught my eye in her portfolio were the delicately painted tableware, for which she was commissioned by Rukmini, the uber creative brain behind Trumatter. Rukmini, on an inspired visit to Coorg, painted the beautiful motif and then worked with Tejashree to get this stunning range produced for her online shop.

More of Tejashree’s brilliant work can be seen here and you can get in touch with her for custom pieces.

Minimal Indian

Minimal Indian is a concept home decor label based out of Bangalore, started by Adrita Sarkar and her husband Chintan. The label draws it’s inspiration from the time of simplicity and authenticity and is meant for every home that carries the nostalgia of simpler times.

For the ceramics, Adrita works with studio potters in Bangalore, who prepare the bisque fired pieces. Adrita hand paints each and every pattern, which are drawn on the ceramic bisque pieces and then hand painted with rigger brush using lead free underglazes.

Adrita is a design graduate from NIFT and did her professional training in Fashion Marketing from London College of Fashion. She worked for 12 years in fashion retail before starting Minimal Indian. Her husband, Chintan has done his Masters in Business Design from Domus Academy, Milan and now focuses on space design and home styling.

Believer and practitioner of minimal lifestyle, the label does home textiles as well. Working with artisans from Jaipur, the motifs are first carved out on sheesham wood to create original blocks, which are then used to block print on natural linens.

You can find more of Minimal Indian’s elegant portfolio of products on their website and here.

Kalimann Studio

Kashmira Shreeram, an architect turned potter, runs her studio in Pune. As an architecture student she spent time in Auroville exploring traditional and environment friendly ways of building. She then spent 7 months learning pottery at Golden bridge Pottery, Pondicherry and later, assisted well known studio potter Veena Chandran, and apprenticed with Mike Dodd and Micki Schloessingk in the UK.

Kalimann Studio, literally means play-clay in Tamil, Kashmira’s mother tongue. She is drawn towards the simplicity of traditional stone, brass and terracotta pots and their decoration from various parts of India. Her intent is to make simple functional pots and sometimes add value to it with small, playful patterns. Her favorites at the moment being roughly drawn lines, small lotuses or fluting techniques. She hopes to translate her architectural vocabulary to experiment with thrown and altered pots in the near future.

Find more of Kashmira’s emerging work at Kalimann Studio here