Clay, Comfort and Chaos

Kishita Nayyar 

April 22, 2024

I found clay accidentally. Or should I say clay found me. 

I have always been somewhat creative. I was the kid in school who would often be caught with paints and brushes. Growing up I was never interested in going to school to study more ‘practical’ degrees like the rest of my friends, so I decided to study literature and then moved to London to get an Art Degree. In between all that I had planned, ceramics were never part of the picture. 

I just decided to take a random beginner’s class in Ceramics before I moved to London as a hobby. But it never went away. It stuck and it resonated with who I was as a person and more so as an artist.

Clay chose me.

And I chose clay.

Clay as a medium has memory. And it receives . 

It’s more receptive than humans are in most situations. It listens, perceives and reacts. I believe anything that’s made with clay is true to the artist. It reacts, remembers and reflects the intentions and integrity of the artist. The ideas in my head translate each and every inch of it on clay, in its form, shape, color and body. 

That’s what stuck me to clay. Its power to tell stories. It’s absolutely incredible how a medium just in itself contains so much in itself. And still gives. I found clay to be the perfect medium with which I could narrate stories that take a tangible haptic form. They are not just words anymore, that one could hear or words that one reads and then moves away from. Once these stories take shape in clay and are fired to the extreme temperatures of more than a thousand degree Celsius it embodies those stories in itself and then remains. It lives on from that moment onwards in the eyes of anybody who wishes to spend a moment with it. 

I have always been interested in stories of women who look like me. Come from the same place as I do  and have lived similar experiences as I have had. I would wish that these stories go beyond and reach the eyes of more. So I decided, clay would take these stories forward for me.