NEW YORK, NY.- Some pieces call to mind puffy cumulus clouds floating in the sky, except each is spotted and has sprouted four legs. Another looks like some kind of coral growing at the bottom of the sea — or is that a fist?

All the offbeat shapes that Korean American ceramist Janny Baek has been creating lately, soon to be on view in a solo show called “The Pleasure of Growth” at New York gallery Culture Object, are distant descendants of various forms of natural life. And all appear to be morphing or otherwise on the move.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the artist’s life has been in flux, too.

Baek came to New York with her parents from Seoul, South Korea, as a young child and, after growing up in Korean enclaves in Queens, studied ceramics at the Rhode Island School of Design. She found work sculpting characters for stop-motion films, but she eventually returned to school — this time to Harvard — and got a master’s degree in architecture, then started a firm with her husband, Thomas McMahon, also an architect.

As McMahon-Baek Architecture found success doing high-end residential work and was able to hire more staff, she felt drawn back to ceramics. Last summer, when the firm rented an office in Manhattan, a 325-square-foot studio was set aside for her. Now, at age 49, she is devoting herself to ceramics nearly full time.




She builds her pieces by hand with plain white clay and then applies colored clay that she stains herself and stores in plastic bags in bins stacked on the studio’s shelves. Sometimes she adds strips to form undulating ridges or presses bits of colored clay into carved-out areas as inlays. She has adapted the Japanese technique of nerikomi, stacking slices of colored clay and then cutting through them to obtain a cross section with a pattern that she can use as surface decoration.

Standing 1 or 2 feet tall, the pieces are vessels (that could hold, say, a budding branch) or lidded containers. Their functionality invites people to engage with them rather than just look at them, she said in an interview in her studio, which is on a high floor and flooded with natural light. “The fact that you would touch them or use them or move them or lift up the top adds another element of interest,” she said.

If her works look simultaneously familiar and strange, that’s something she traces to her experience as an immigrant child. Back then, she felt “uncomfortable or embarrassed” about looking different from her white peers and, like many others in her situation, tried hard to blend in. Now as an adult and an accomplished professional — not to mention the mother of two biracial daughters — she celebrates differences, which make “life much more interesting and richer,” she said.

The joy of finally feeling at home in her skin and of doing her own thing — free of the constraints of working for clients, within the confines of an architectural space or from a computer — comes through in her fantastical, dynamic creations.

Ultimately, her “little universe of life-forms,” as she called them, are an appeal for “open-mindedness.” They are “meant to be hopeful,” she said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.