The ceramic artists shaping contemporary clay art today

Clay is one of humanity’s oldest materials yet it has long sat at the margins of serious artistic discourse, seen as utilitarian, as belonging to another kind of maker. To work with it is to negotiate constantly with a medium that captures every hesitation and yields nothing unearned. Yet the four artists—Aman Khanna, Rekha Goyal, Kausha Ghelani, and Adil Writer—embrace it with deliberate conviction. Through distinct paths and decades of practice, each has forged in clay’s honest resistance a language wholly and irreducibly their own.

THE WEIGHT OF SILENCE

Aman Khanna arrived at clay two months deep into a sculpture that kept cracking, resisting, and demanding something more than he’d been asked to give in nearly a decade of graphic design. Khanna had gone to Pictoplasma Academy in Berlin in 2013 with a straightforward idea: translate one of his drawn characters into three dimensions. What he came back with was harder to articulate. A practice. A compulsion.The particular knowledge that some materials tell you the truth about yourself whether you asked for it or not.

“It clicked the first time I put my hands in,” he recalls. “After a whole day of work I would sometimes end up with only a small fragment to show for it. That resistance felt real and deeply human.” Design, the world Khanna was leaving behind, had given him fluency and taken away consequence. Clay offered the opposite. “In clay, you negotiate with gravity, moisture, time, and fire. The third dimension gave me weight and silence.” What emerged from that negotiation—slowly, through accumulation and the patience a slow material demands—were the Claymen, genderless figurines caught perpetually mid-gesture, mid-thought. Khanna says he is, at his core, a student of behaviour and clay is an honest medium for that. “It started with a head, almost expressionless,” he says. “As the body of work expanded, so did the emotional vocabulary. Limbs appeared. The figures are no longer static—they are balancing, carrying, hesitating, participating.”

“It clicked the first time I put my hands in,” he recalls. “After a whole day of work I would sometimes end up with only a small fragment to show for it. That resistance felt real and deeply human.”Design, the world Khanna was leaving behind, had given him fluency and taken away consequence. Clay offered the opposite. “In clay, you negotiate with gravity, moisture, time, and fire. The third dimension gave me weight and silence.” What emerged from that negotiation—slowly, through accumulation and the patience a slow material demands—were the Claymen, genderless figurines caught perpetually mid-gesture,mid-thought. Khanna says he is, at his core, a student of behaviour and clay is an honest medium for that. “It started with a head, almost expressionless,” he says. “As the body of work expanded, so did the emotional vocabulary. Limbs appeared. The figures are no longer static—they are balancing, carrying, hesitating, participating.” 

 

Across civilisations, figurative forms have acted as markers of their time, reflecting belief systems, rituals, structures of power, and he sees his figures in that lineage. But they are recording something different—the mundane and the unnoticed. “The head became central because it is where everything seems to unfold. Thoughts, anxieties, ideas, ego, and doubt all reside there,” he adds. The anonymity is not minimalism for its sake. It is, Khanna argues, the precise mechanism through which the work generates its intimacy. “The less specific the figure, the more universal it becomes. When you remove defined identity, you remove distraction. Viewers are not judging age, race, or status. They are seeing themselves.” Khanna’s studio practice reflects the temperament of someone who has made genuine peace with a slow medium rather than merely resigned himself to it.

Mornings begin deliberately—music, measured momentum, commissions and technical problems, and the practical machinery of making things. The conceptual ideas arrive in the margins. Knowing when a piece is finished produces something he can only describe as a quiet click. Nothing excessive. The urge to add something decorative is, for him, a reliable sign he has already gone too far. “A finished piece feels calm and balanced. Almost indifferent to my interference,” he shares.

 

YIELD & RESISTANCE

When Rekha Goyal decided to specialise in ceramics in art school in the late 1990s, teachers steered her toward painting. More serious, they implied. More legible as art. She stayed with clay. In the years since,Goyal’s practice now spans installations, murals, and art objects in hotels, museums, and private collections across India and abroad. “A lot has changed since then,”she reflects. “Almost 30 years later, when I see collectors and curators excited to work with the medium, it makes me want to welcome them in their exploration.”

Goyal grew up between Mumbai, Curaçao, and Venezuela, summers folding back into North India, where cousins traded urban toys for terracotta ones and the colour alone felt like information. When she was 12, a school ceramics class introduced her to glazes and kilns and the idea that chemistry and artistic language were not separate things but the same. She has not recovered from that realisation ever. “The science of the medium is such an integral part of its visual and artistic language,” she insists. The household Goyal grew up in had an engineering bent but her mother, who turned on music before anything else each morning, understood early what Goyal was reaching toward. She enrolled her daughter in art classes after discovering, incidentally, that she had won a school competition without telling anyone.

What followed was decades of consistency—art as constant as the evening puzzles her father set. For Goyal, it offered both yield and resistance. The tactility is the point. “Clay behaves with us the way we behave with it,” she tells me. “It channels one’s energy and thoughts, and when you are deep enough in the process, the artist and the medium become one. Every stroke reflects something—an emotion, a hesitation, a kind of pressure you didn’t know you were carrying.”The material records what painting might let you avoid.

What emerged were works rooted in a specific understanding: that clay in India has never been only functional and decorative. It has always been both, and more. Goyal has spent much time in Kutch curating for Khamir and Hermès, and encountered communities in which the potter—the prajapati—holds the threshold of birth and death alike. “Clay has always held the emotional and the conceptual within it.”

Goyal’s week is divided between two spaces with two different tempos. At The Pottery Lab, the community studio she founded 11 years ago, the work is outward—teaching, making art accessible to adults who never had language for what they needed to make. Over 8,000 people have passed through. At her private atelier, installations take months—holding grief, memory, or national fervour, as in Building Blocks for the Mahindra Museum, or constitutional weight, as in Weaving the Fabric. “The essence, I believe, is feeling connected to both legacy and the contemporary, being respectful of what came before and then finding one’s own expression within it.”

THE MIRACLE IN MAKING

“We’ve been in a committed relationship ever since,” Kausha Ghelani tells me, and she is not, as it turns out, talking about a person. She is talking about clay not as a medium or material, but as something closer to a life companion, one she didn’t choose as gradually recognise. Growing up in Mumbai, the idea of becoming an artist never presented itself as a viable declaration. It crept in sideways when she spent hours sitting beside the sculptors who shaped Ganpati idols in the weeks before Ganesh Chaturthi. “I was completely mesmerised watching their hands turn soft clay into something divine. There was something magical about it. I didn’t realise it then, but that’s where it all began.”

The name she would eventually give her practice carries that sense of miraculousness. Kiseki Beetle—Kiseki meaning miracle in Japanese—was born on a night walk during a pottery residency in Himachal Pradesh in 2017, along a hillside that turned out to be entirely lit by fireflies. Still, unhurried, the whole stretch of darkness flickering softly. “I knew that if I ever had my own ceramic brand, I wanted it to feel like that moment. The beetle felt like the perfect companion. And I think that’s exactly how I see my practice too, not loud, just slowly glowing in its own time.”Nature has always been the first language, though Ghelani is careful to draw the distinction between reference and destination. “Now it feels more like nature filtered through memory and feeling.”

Ghelani works across coiling, slab-building and intuitive shaping, through the slow discipline of drying, firing, and long patience. “By the time a piece comes out of the kiln,it feels like it has lived a full life already. And in a way, it has.”Loss is structural to that life. Early failures registered as deeply personal. “Over time you become more accepting. You understand that unpredictability is part of the material’s nature and it humbles you. That fragility is also what makes it so beautiful.”

Ghelani belongs to a generation that has arrived at clay art without the conventional institutional scaffolding drawn instead by instinct, by personal necessity, by the particular courage it takes to step away from prescribed trajectories toward something slower and more deliberate.She is easy about this. “Social media has allowed artists who didn’t come through the traditional route to share their journey openly. And honestly, if more people are finding their voice through clay, I think that’s something to celebrate,” she concludes.

 

THE LONG STAY 

“I thought I was going for a seven-month break. I ended up never leaving,” says Adil Writer, who arrived at Golden Bridge Pottery in Pondicherry in 1998 with a large project on hold in Bangalore and no particular plan beyond a pause. Writer had spent years as an architect—JJ College in Bombay, a master’s in urban design from University of Houston, a stint at Gensler in San Francisco, and over a decade at Talati & Panthaky in Bombay. Before Ishalgad Ceramics, clay work had been a weekend thing, something he kept returning to without quite knowing why.

For Writer, seven months became three years. Under Ray Meeker and Deborah Smith, he found what the weekends had been pointing toward but hadn’t yet named. “None of this would have been possible had it not been for Ray and Deborah,” he tells me. By 2001, he was at Mandala Pottery in Auroville. He has not left.

Writer’s studio runs two tracks. Functional handmade tableware on one side; and the sculptural work one the other in a kiln called Upma—designed by Meeker in the early 90s. “Most of my sculptural work is soda-fired, where soda enters the chamber as vapour at peak temperature, moves where the flame takes it, and leaves its mark without asking permission. Till the unloading happens, you don’t really know what the kiln is going to give you.”

Away from the kiln, he paints at his home atelier, unfired clay and acrylics on large canvases, a practice that runs parallel to his ceramics without competing with it. “It keeps me off the streets! Tactility carries over on the canvas; the unpredictability does not. How the clay and paint dries and displays its crackle the morning after, is not in my hands.”

Beneath it all runs a quiet argument captured in his essay called It’s All Kala—pointing to a Sanskrit that holds no separate word for art and craft. The hierarchy, he believes, is a colonial inheritance, baked into classrooms where the painting went on the notice board and the boat went in the bin. He sees the consequences at every exhibition: a large painting selling for crores while something beside it—as considered, as large, as present—commands a fraction of the price. “This yeh to mitti hai attitude is what I contest all the time,” he says. 

After more than two decades, the practice has the density of something repeatedly tested and unbroken. Writer still rises before a kiln opening with the restlessness of someone who knows what is at stake and cannot do anything further about it. “It’s like the old days when you handed in your Kodak roll for processing. Till you got the negatives back, you were on tenterhooks. I don’t think that feeling is ever going to leave me and if and when it does, it will be time to find a new passion.”

Lead image: Courtesy Claymen

 

This article first appeared in the April 2026 issue of Harper's Bazaar India  

 

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