It might be tempting to throw one of Saori Matsushita’s paper airplanes across the room, but we promise you the landing would be less than graceful.

From her Seattle studio, Matsushita transforms delicate sheets of porcelain into vases, mugs, and sculptures that appear as if they were folded from paper. Punctured with binder holes and the fringed edge of a torn-out sheet, the functional objects bear the iconic blue lines of a school notebook. Other works are similarly deceptive, like the cloth sack or collared-shirt vessels that capture the folds, bends, and bulges of fabric in ceramic.

To create these pieces, Matsushita utilizes nerikomi, a Japanese pottery technique that involves layering colored bodies of clay together and then cutting them to reveal a patterned section. Stripes of blue and pink appear through stacking slabs rather than the glazing process, and the artist builds most works by hand (head to her YouTube to see more).

When Matsushita began incorporating this labor-intensive method into her practice in 2023, it helped develop what’s now become her signature style. She shares:

Previously, I focused on Neriage, a technique where colored clays are combined and wheel-thrown. However, I transitioned to Nerikomi and began treating porcelain sheets like origami or leather to create more unique, personal expressions of my vision. I feel this shift has allowed me to establish a style that truly reflects my individuality as an artist.

One of Matsushita’s pieces will be featured in Saltstone Ceramics’ annual Mug Madness tournament this March. Follow the latest in her practice, along with announcements about new works available in her shop, on Instagram.

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Equipped with vibrant cotton thread and wooden panels, Nosheen Iqbal stitches sculptural embroideries that draw on her Pakistani and Islamic heritage. Architectural arabesques and Punjabi craft traditions influence her mixed-media motifs, including phulkari, or floral folk embroideries, and woodblock printed reliefs known as bagh.

Iqbal utilizes half-circles and semi-precious beads to add depth and visual intrigue to the works. Creating shadows and catching the light, these meticulously planned details allow a shift in perspective depending on the viewer’s position. The sweeping lines of color create “saturated pathways that reveal their intensity and depth,” she adds, “allowing my work to offer a shifting experience of light, color, and connection.”

By emphasizing dimension and the interactions between materials, Iqbal hopes to push the medium in new directions while honoring broader making traditions. She says:

Craftsmanship holds a profound significance in Pakistani culture, where artistry is revered as a lifelong discipline that shapes identity and community. This respect for meticulous craftsmanship is integral to my own practice. By selecting thoughtful materials—wood, semi-precious beads, and thread—I aim to honor this tradition. Each piece is a reflection of this cultural value, merging refined textures with precision to invite a tactile, immersive experience for the viewer.

Born in London, Iqbal lives and works in Dallas and recently left a long career in design and art direction to become an artist full-time. You can find available pieces on her website and follow her work on Instagram.

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Most dogs spend at least half of their day asleep—some getting z’s for upwards of 18 hours. Whether curled up on the floor or enjoying a long-legged stretch, the subjects of Emily O’Leary’s rugs evoke our beloved pets.

Based on photographs of actual dogs, she focuses mostly on animals the artist doesn’t know. “I like to hook dogs that are pretty ‘mutty’ looking, that don’t look like yard-bound Golden Retrievers or Doodles,” she tells Colossal. “I’m attracted to the shared history of humans and dogs—how the bulk of their domestication may have happened somewhat inadvertently.”

Employing a carpet-making technique called rug hooking, the earliest form of which can be traced to Northern England in the early 19th century, O’Leary spends several months on a single piece. Compared to tufting, “It’s a slower, more traditional process,” she says, but the process allows each individual loop to be applied at a different height, giving her the ability to create three-dimensional reliefs.

O’Leary learned to make rugs after predominantly focusing on embroidery. When some friends organized an exhibition themed around dogs, she had the idea to make a work in the shape of a life-size canine. “I’m lucky that the rugs sort of do inspire tender feelings in the people who see them, but that they’re also a bit uncanny,” she says.

The pieces’ weight and realistic details engender an intimate connection as they come to life, so to speak. “I really feel like I’ve built a relationship with the object,” she says, adding: “Sometimes the dogs I hook have wounds or scars. The dog rug I’m working on right now is missing a little chunk of her ear.  I want to depict them as they are, not stuffed animal versions.”

Find more on O’Leary’s website and Instagram.

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Glasgow-based artist Laura K. Sayers creates tiny paper worlds that sit within the compact margins of a stamp. Illustrating children’s books and whipping up projects for magazines leaves the artist with plenty of small scraps given another life through a series of layered postage.

Sayers begins by choosing a color palette, carefully selecting harmonious shades of paper and oftentimes painting over sheets to achieve the perfect tone. Referencing her own photographs, the artist then creates quick thumbnails to loosely guide her process. Using sharp scissors and a scalpel, layers of meticulously cut paper begin to take the shape of familiar landscapes, finished with perforated edges and sometimes nestled within a painted frame.

“Even though these stamps are very small and detailed, they have a lot of satisfying limitations to them: cropping a scene, using a limited color palette, and the amount of detail you can actually fit in when you’re cutting shapes on that scale,” Sayers explains. “As someone who regularly overcomplicates things, I find these restrictions quite helpful and a good challenge.”

Sayers is working on a few book projects and planning her future stamp collections. Next month, a few of her pieces will be exhibited in Portland at Nucleus Gallery, so be sure to follow the artist on Instagram and see her website for more updates.

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From ceramics and wool fiber, Nicole McLaughlin (previously) summons striking connections between materials, heritage, and personal experiences. She draws upon the rich traditions of historically domestic crafts to reconsider their roles today, merging ceramics and textiles into elegant, cascading wall sculptures.

Drawing on artisanal trades like pottery and weaving, McLaughlin deconstructs preconceptions about form and function, emphasizing mediums, techniques, and themes through the unexpected pairing of stoneware and fiber. Her works encourage us to think critically about relationships between tenderness and strength or past and present.

Many of the pieces shown here are from McLaughlin’s ongoing Indigo Series, which explores the history of the Mayan pigment and its taps into the continuity of life cycles, history, and culture. Streams of wool fiber flow from central openings in glazed ceramic spheres, referencing the life-giving flow of water as a parallel to fertility and maternal care.

McLaughlin gave birth to a daughter in early 2024, which dramatically shifted how she viewed her studio practice. The work in her most recent exhibition, String of Life at Anderson Yezerski Gallery, merges personal experiences and her Mexican cultural heritage, delving into themes of life and the transformative journey of motherhood.

“The transformation of organic material echoes the transformative nature of motherhood,” McLaughlin said in a statement for the show. “The range of colors captures an intense emotional spectrum—from the vitality of birth to the softer, more intimate moments.”

For McLaughlin, cochineal carries an equivalent significance. The brilliant magenta hue emerges from carmine dye, also known as cochineal, which comes from crushing an insect of the same name. The color plays a vital role in Indigenous material culture and heritage of the Americas.

For the Aztecs and Mayans, red was symbolic of the gods, the sun, and blood, and the dye was traded throughout Central and South America for use in rituals, producing pigments for manuscripts and murals, and for dyeing cloth and feathers.

“During the Mayan empire, indigo was combined with clay and incense to create a pigment known as Maya blue,” she says. “The pigment was said to hold the healing power of water in the agricultural community.”

McLaughlin’s work is in the group exhibition OBJECTS: USA 2024 at R & Company in New York, which continues through tomorrow. The artist is currently taking a short break from the studio in anticipation of working toward a solo exhibition at Adamah Ceramics in Columbus, Ohio, which will open this fall. See more on her website, and follow updates on Instagram.

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A few years ago, Sophie O’Neill—who works as The Stir-Crazy Crafter—hadn’t yet learned how to embroider. She didn’t have any supplies, but one idea in particular sparked a creative flame: an embroidery journal. The first one she saw was made by fiber artist Sam Gillespie, and O’Neill immediately sourced some basic supplies and began popping needle and thread through the fabric. She was hooked.

Every day, O’Neill stitches a single symbol or word that she chooses to represent her day. “This could be a cup of coffee because I went out for drinks with friends, a firework because I wanted the New Year’s Eve fireworks display, or even a tissue because I wasn’t feeling well,” she tells Colossal. “At the end of the year, I’ll have curated a collection of 365 icons that represent my entire year.” And as 2024 wrapped up, she completed her fifth journal, containing more than 1,800 individual images overall.

One trick to the overall composition is knowing where to start. O’Neill lays out her blank, circular canvas like a clock or a 12-piece pie, in which each hour or slice represents one month. “This is one of those things that seems complicated at first, but throughout the year it gets easier,” she says.

Even on days when she doesn’t do anything out of the ordinary, O’Neill chronicles the 24-hour period in some way. The journal “makes me think outside the box about what I do on a daily basis,” she says. “Maybe all I did during the day was read a book and do a bit of cleaning, but I can break down those actions into smaller things to figure out what I can embroider for my daily icon.”

The playful enamel pins often seen in photos of her in-progress pieces are known as needle minders, where the prong is replaced by a set of magnets that can hold the needle when she’s not actively embroidering. It’s a tool O’Neill can’t live without.

In a similar vein to the daily stitches, O’Neill also tracks the books she peruses throughout the year, embroidering bookmarks shaped like shelves that are filled with color to represent the titles she’s read.

You can purchase patterns and supplies in the artist’s Etsy shop, and follow updates on Instagram. And if you’re an embroidery journaler, too, you can join O’Neill’s Facebook group to share your progress and see how others design theirs. (via Kottke)

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Through tiny holes puncturing hand-shaped vessels, Stockholm-based artist Caroline Harrius (previously) embroiders delicate designs. She merges two distinct crafts—ceramics and fiber art—that don’t typically share much in common, exploring relationships between form and function, decoration and utility, and historically gendered artisanal practices.

Harrius opens a solo show this month titled Blue Memories at Kaolin in Stockholm, the culmination of a three-month residency she undertook in Porsgrunn, Norway, after being awarded the municipality’s porcelain grant. The program comprises a collaborative effort between the local porcelain factory and Kunsthall Grenland to support contemporary artistry in the material.

“The meeting between textile and ceramics is irrational and full of resistance,” Harrius says in a statement for the exhibition. She spent time at the Porsgruns Porcelain Factory with free reign to expand on existing ideas and apply new inspiration.

“Next to the workshop was an antique dealer with rows of boxes marked ’10 SEK for everything!,’ filled with objects,” she says. From these trinkets, which the dealer had deemed practically worthless, Harrius imagined new floral designs.

“I embroider in porcelain with cotton thread in an attempt to recontextualize the crafts,” she says. “I want to make an attempt to highlight all the precious and impressive craft objects that are often left behind within the walls of the home, continue to challenge hierarchies in the field, and make visible traditional female craftsmanship.”

Blue Memories runs from January 11 to 26. See more on the artist’s website and Instagram.

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Rockets soar and sparks fly in Andrea Love’s animated tribute to a favorite New Year’s Eve tradition. In case you can’t make it to a live event this year, sit back and celebrate the launch into 2025 with the artist’s mesmerizing pyrotechnic show.

Love (previously) is known for her tender stop-motion portrayals of daily routines in her Cooking with Wool series, along with myriad felted scenarios for clients like Loewe, Michael’s, Hermès, and Netflix. Learn more about her work on her website, and explore all of her videos on YouTube.

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Rice harvests produce straw, a natural byproduct of the dried grain. Traditionally, the material could be used for a wide variety of objects from tatami mats to food wrappers to carrier bags. Many of those products are now made using synthetic materials, and rice straw is more often used for ceremonial or sacred decorations like Shinto shimenawa festoons, which are installed around the New Year and can range from a few centimeters to several meters long.

For Tokyo-based artist ARKO, rice straw finds a contemporary application in elegant wall hangings. “I started thinking that it should be something new, apart from the old traditions, given that there must be a reason why straw vanished from our life,” she says.

Interested in the organic nature of the medium, ARKO embraces how environmental changes can influence the look of the work as a reminder that the fiber originated from the ground. Sometimes moisture in the air makes the pieces feel heavy or the straw will emit a scent. Most of the time she maintains the natural color of the thin stalks, occasionally dying layers black or using contrasting string to hold the composition together.

“In modern times, straw has been replaced by artificial materials and is manufactured with the premise of environmental pollution. (It) is mass-produced and discarded in large quantities,” ARKO says. Although she doesn’t prescribe a ritual meaning to the work, the sculptures evoke “the laws of nature and the great power of life that are often overlooked in modern society where economy takes priority.”

ARKO is represented by Somewhere Tokyo, and you can find more work on her website and Instagram.

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In ancient Greece, amphorae were commonly used for carrying or storing liquids and grains like wine, oil, or cereal. A narrow neck and a large, oval body were easily moved with handles on each side. For Paris-based Döppel Studio, a collaboration between Lionel Dinis Salazar and Jonathan Omar, a millennia-old form inspires a contemporary collection.

Néophore is a series of terracotta and enamel vessels intersected with looping, handle-like tubes of glowing neon. Situated between sculpture, vessel, and lamp, the series takes a sophisticated yet playful approach to the relationship between form and function.

Salazar and Omar teamed up with ceramicist Aliénor Martineau, who specializes in mineral-based natural glazes, to customize a reflective enamel that would come alive under the light. Find more on Döppel Studio’s website and Instagram, and if you’re in Paris, you can see Néophore at ToolsGalerie through January 11.

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