Kailey Shakerin

The basis of my current practice is materiality and storytelling. I work in clay because it invites touch, use, and reflection. The slow, deliberate processes of slab building, layering nerikomi patterns, and creating stories and narrative through that process imbues the objects themselves with my own emotions about animals.

Though I am working with very traditional pottery making techniques, I am more interested in how they can be pushed to their limit visually rather than perfected technically. In every next nerikomi project I make, I want to make more complex, clear, colorful images. The subjects I touch on are uncomfortable and violent—the choice to have bright and cutesy details and sculptural elements is intentional. The items are meant to attract and disgust at the same time. 

I think this is similar to our relationship with animals—they are emotionally complex in their own right, but we reject that unsettling part of them, and dress them up in doggy dresses and bows instead. My nerikomi guinea pig incense trays are to be used in pairs, separated from one another in different households, and used as a cute centerpiece. But all of them together have a narrative of death, decay, disappointment. Such is how we treat animals in most industries; individually desirable, and the industry as a whole ignored.

My interests generally are ever changing, but within ceramics I find the more I learn the more I don’t know. I’m at an intersection of techniques and topics in my professional art—animation, nerikomi, colored clay, sculpture, animal rights, satirical objects—that all mix well, and I want to mesh more techniques together. Pottery can be the finished object, but I can imagine the process being recorded in such a way that the making becomes part of or a separate artwork entirely.

I hope to create a platform or charity that engages with animal rights through craft, design, and art. I would hope my own work would be exemplary of such a platform.