Mariia Tokovenko
Ceramics Artist
Jersey City
Mari is a ceramics artist and pottery teacher based in New York. She works from her studio at Project Studios in Hoboken, where she hand-builds and wheel-throws between teaching semester-long courses, one-time workshops, and handbuilding classes. Her signature long-handle cups and matcha sets have been sold at the Brooklyn Museum store. Her sculptural work is fired using raku — a process defined by fire, unpredictability, and what survives both. She has been working with clay for six years and is still not done figuring out what it can hold.
RAKU
I work in ceramics — wheel-throwing, hand-building, raku firing — but what I'm really making is a record of what survives heat. My most recent sculptures were fired using my own hair as combustible material. In raku, organic matter burns away during firing and leaves smoke trails permanently embedded in the clay. Horsehair is the standard material. I used my own. The difference mattered: I wanted to leave something literally of myself in the work — not a mark I made, but a mark the fire made out of me. I've worked with clay for six years and have taught wheel-throwing in New York for several of them. Teaching has shown me that clay holds memory — the memory of hands, of pressure, of what we do with care and what we do in haste. My own practice has become a way of processing what I cannot hold any other way: old selves, old places, loss. My father died in Ukraine. The smoke moving through these pieces has somewhere to go. The long-handle cups I make and sell are the other side of this — objects built for intimacy, for the daily ritual of being chosen by someone who wanted exactly this.
