In a quiet corner of Harvard’s ceramics lab in Allston, buzzing with activity on a Friday afternoon, artist Ashton Keen is in her studio, examining a clay teacup she’s recently made. A potter’s wheel sits at her elbow, and several large buckets of clay, each a different shade of red, line the wall behind her. Nearby, a set of shelves hold other newly created pieces: bowls, tumblers, and round-bellied jars, each decorated with a single dandelion flower, painted in black, like a silhouette.
Looking down, Keen turns the teacup over in her hands, running her fingers across the lip, the base, the rust-colored body, the painted dandelion. “These are all experiments,” she says finally, explaining the technique she’s been trying to perfect, which involves dipping the pieces in a clay glaze partway through the firing process. None of the pieces are exactly what she wants yet: a little too glossy, a little too dry, not quite enough life. “It’s not a disaster,” she says. “It’s just not a success—yet.” She smiles. “But that’s the exciting thing, right? There’s no finish line. In your mind, the next piece is always the best piece.”
It has been a busy few months for Keen, who is teaching classes and making pottery as one of the ceramics program’s two artists-in-residence for 2024-25 (the other is industrial designer Yonatan Hopp). After earning her M.F.A. in May from Utah State University, she flew to Japan for a two-month residency at the Shigaraki Ceramic Cultural Park, located in one of the country’s oldest pottery-producing sites. There, she made pots using a wood-fired kiln. It was a hands-on experience from start to finish. “Before I arrived, they cut down a plum tree in front of the residency building,” Keen says, “and when I got there, they were like, ‘We’ve left this here to dry for you.’” She used a chainsaw and wood-splitter to cut the tree into pieces to fuel the kiln. She also took part in mixing the clay bodies—Shigaraki is known for its rich deposits—and used a foot-powered kick-wheel for throwing her pots. “So it feels like you’re part of every single step,” she says. “You get to know all of it, and where it came from. Nothing is handed to you. It was incredible.”
Keen became a potter almost by accident. As a child growing up in Louisiana, she was an athlete, not an artist. A runner and swimmer, she played soccer and did triathlons. Her parents enrolled her in an arts high school because it was one of the best in the state. There were no sports teams to join, and she never did learn to draw or paint, but during her senior year, in a pottery class with a dynamic teacher, Keen caught her stride. Finally, here was an art form where failure didn’t discourage her. Instead, “It was exciting,” she says. “Pottery is a craft, and you have to practice and fail and get better.” She kept getting better.
Majoring in ceramics at the University of Mississippi, she found inspiration in the university museum’s collection of Greek pottery. “I’d just go and sit and study the shapes,” she says. She especially loved amphoras, “these beautiful vessels with huge shoulders and a volumetric body, but the top is super tight, and the foot is also tight, and so they contain this very vertical volume.” Most of the pieces Keen makes today are pouring vessels, and this Greek form—angular, delicate, simultaneously narrow and capacious—is visible in many of them.
Keen’s most recent pieces, including those she is working on during her Harvard residency, also have a more personal origin. A few years ago, she came out to her parents as gay, “and they didn’t handle it super well,” she says. At the time, Keen was living in North Carolina, interning at a studio where she helped process wild clays from the area and prepare them to be used in pottery. While there, she started trying out a new design: the single dandelion flower, all black, its stem bending slightly downward. “I have a lot of childhood memories about gardening with my mother and pulling up dandelions because they’re weeds,” she says. “And so I kind of think of them as representing the self, and how I sometimes feel like the weed in my family’s garden.”
Most of Keen’s work reflects on her relationships with loved ones—that’s partly why she so often makes functional pieces meant for the kitchen table, where families and friends gather. She almost always makes objects in pairs, a gesture of both longing and intimacy. “The kitchen is an intimate space,” she says. “It’s where you cook for someone; you show them love by making them food.” Her most recent work, with the dandelion design, shares those same impulses, but with an edge. “I want my pots to feel friendly, warm, inviting, and beautiful,” she says. “But also, in my mind, I feel like they’re melancholic.”
Keen’s own kitchen is filled with handmade ceramics—her own, but also pieces made by friends. Recently, she’s been storing her olive oil in a pot made by a graduate school friend and roommate who stayed in Utah to teach at a college there. “And so, every time I go to use some olive oil, I think about him and our time together,” she says. “How hard we pushed each other, what a good cook he was. I miss him. But it’s also so exciting to see this little pouring pot he made. A gift.”
