Studio Diary, Entry 3: Why Porcelain (and Not, Say, Silver)
The short answer is: nobody picks porcelain. Porcelain picks you.
The longer answer involves a pandemic, a career that looks like a pinball machine, and two women on opposite sides of the world buying kilns within months of each other.
My mom was a museum curator. Then a graphic designer. Then a fashion designer. Then COVID locked everyone inside and she started doing the one thing she had not tried yet: pottery. Not as a business plan. More like a "the world is ending and I need something to do with my hands" situation.
She spent two years learning. Kilns, glazes, temperatures, the whole thing. Around the same time, I moved to Thailand, bought a kiln, and started doing the same. About a year ago we looked at what we were both making and thought: what if we combined this into jewelry?
So, porcelain. Not because we ran a market analysis. Because it was already on the table. Literally.
But then the material started showing us things we did not expect.
It outlasts everything. Not "lasts a few years." Archaeologists-dig-it-up-after-millennia. The Venus of Dolni Vestonice is a ceramic figure roughly 29,000 years old. Older than agriculture. Older than the wheel. Still in one piece. Silver tarnishes. Brass turns green. Resin yellows. Porcelain just stays.
It remembers every detail. The clay is so fine-grained that when you sculpt a moth wing or a tiny flower, the detail survives through drying, bisque firing, glazing, and final firing. Try that with silver. You will need a magnifying glass, specialized tools, and more patience than any one person should have.
Gold becomes part of it. We brush 12% liquid gold onto the glazed surface and fire it. The gold fuses permanently into the glaze. It does not tarnish. It does not peel. It is not a layer on top. It is inside the piece.
It tricks your hand. Lighter than metal but heavier than you expect from looking at it. There is a satisfying weight to it. Like it means something.
The trade-off? Yes, it can break if you throw it at a wall. We recommend not doing that.
That is why porcelain. We did not choose the material. We just kept showing up at the kiln until it became obvious.