Makers

Craft That Calms

Four artists share the stories behind objects they make to help us rest and reflect.

By Jon Spayde
March 21, 2024

Spring 2024

Features + Profiles

Goods

Free To Read

Photo by Kimberly Hero

Andersson’s Light Vessel 15, 2019—made of blown glass and water—radiates a sense of calm, 14.5 x 10.25 in.

Slowing down the pace of life. Making time for relaxation, for reconnection with what matters, for meditation. It’s not easy in a fast-paced world full of instant communication, information overload, and the clutter that comes with the American habit of accumulating mass-produced goods.

Establishing rituals can help—especially when the objects used in those rituals are made by hand. Craft’s earthy materials and natural aesthetics, and the way it embodies the careful attention of the maker, can be grounding. Like people involved in the slow food, slow fashion, and slow living movements, those who are drawn to craft are often seeking a more meaningful life, and a slower, more engaged pace.

The four craft artists we profile here make works that support more contemplative living, and all four understand the connections between that way of living and their own soulful, patient craft practice.

“I think it has a very calming effect. People just get lost in it.”

— Jo Andersson

Calm and Reflection

The big, irregular blown-glass orbs that Jo Andersson creates in her studio in Alingsås, Sweden, are called Light Vessels, and they’re designed for fascination and meditation. You fill them with water and then apply light—with a moving source such as a cell phone flashlight or with a stationary lamp—and there’s a contemplative magic in the play of light, shadow, reflection, and refraction. “I think it has a very calming effect,” says the artist. “People just get lost in it.”

Helping people become calm and reflective is part of the life mission of Andersson, an American-born child of Swedish parents. She turned to working with glass as a way to recover from early traumatic experiences.

“I was suffering from PTSD,” she says, “and what glassblowing did for me was help me come into the now, which is one of the most healing things that you can do for trauma. If you’re not present, you lose the glass piece. There’s just no spacing out.”

Andersson relocated to Sweden to get her master’s degree at the prestigious Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts, and Design and to establish her professional practice. The Light Vessels began as an accident, she says. She was spending long hours in the hot shop at Konstfack, experimenting with forms. A particularly unpromising shape emerged. “It wasn’t at all what I was envisioning,” she says. “But I wanted to work with water and light, because water has really awesome energetic properties. So I filled the glass with water anyway, and used my cell phone to light it up, and the light play was just phenomenal. I was like, ‘This is gonna be good.’”

Andersson sells the vessels individually, but her originals were made for an installation titled Being—a darkened room containing 12 illuminated vessels. Being traveled to several Swedish galleries and the American Swedish Institute in Minneapolis. In November she debuted a new iteration of the installation at the Light 23 exhibition in London.

“I’m hoping it’ll be picked up by designers or architects,” she says, “because I’d like to get it into larger spaces where people can see it. I just want to help people on their journeys.”

joanderssonstudios.com | @jo.andersson.studios

Photo by Sarah Maria Yasdani

Portrait of Jo Andersson.

Photo by Kimberly Hero

Jo Andersson pours water into her Light Vessel 4, 2020, 23.5 x 11 in.
Photo by Kimberly Hero

Andersson’s Light Vessel 15, 2019—made of blown glass and water—radiates a sense of calm, 14.5 x 10.25 in.

“I felt like I could put the best visual and physical aspects of sailing into a tub.”

— Seth Rolland

Soaking in the Warmth

Bathing in a wooden tub can be both aesthetically pleasing and restful. Wood retains heat better than porcelain, allowing for a longer soak without adding hot water. The beauty and feel of wood can be grounding, too, and help us feel closer to nature.

Port Townsend, Washington–based furniture designer and wood artist Seth Rolland’s Salish Sea bathtub has these qualities in abundance. It also embodies an experience of peace and pleasure that Rolland remembers with joy—“one of the favorite days of my life,” he says.

“One of my best friends built a sixteen-foot wooden dory, and he and I spent a few months driving it across the country, putting it in every bit of water we could. We got to Charleston, South Carolina, and sailed for five days between islands. We kept changing direction and the wind was always behind us. Going downwind is the nicest part of sailing.”

On that favorite day, which was particularly beautiful, Rolland lay low in the small boat, enjoying the view of sky and horizon beyond the graceful shape of the prow.

“This bathtub is very much that idea,” he says. “You’re immersed in warmth. You have this beautiful shape in front of you. I felt like I could put the best visual and physical aspects of sailing into a tub.”

While bathing in wood may be delightful, making a wooden tub is a real challenge because, as Rolland points out, “wood and water don’t mix. Especially wood and hot water. You have to create the reverse of a wooden boat; instead of keeping the water out, you’re keeping it in. My having done some boatbuilding made me feel like I could make it work.”

He made it work by putting together more than 200 pieces of durable sapele mahogany wood and sealing them with epoxy, then adding a fiberglass layer and six coats of varnish for internal “seaworthiness.” The tub’s sculptural energy and simplicity resonate with his other work—chairs, tables, and other pieces that combine a lively inventiveness with an organic, less-is-more aesthetic.

sethrolland.com | @seth_rolland_furniture

Photo by Myron Gauger

Portrait of Seth Rolland.

Photo by Myron Gauger

Seth Rolland’s Salish Sea Bathtub, 2013, is made of sustainably harvested sapele mahogany, which is noted for its durability, 36 x 95 x 36 in.
Photo by Myron Gauger

An inside detail of the bathtub, which resembles a small boat.

“I collaborate with clay and fire. It’s like improvising with other musicians.”

— Akira Satake

Spontaneity and Peace

The internationally celebrated ceramist Akira Satake, born in Japan and based in North Carolina, makes a range of works, including vessels for the thoughtful, peaceful drinking of tea—teapots, yunomi (cups for everyday tea drinking), and chawan, the bowls from which tea is sipped in the cha-no-yu, the exquisitely simple but historically and culturally rich Japanese tea ceremony.

For Satake—who was a musician and a record producer before burning out on the business and finding ceramics in his 40s—making these pieces, and everything else in his repertoire, requires a special mindset that, if not exactly meditative (wood firing is too demanding for that), is in the moment: open, accepting, collaborative.

“I work with the personality of the clay,” he says. “I collaborate with clay and fire. It’s like improvising with other musicians. And it’s like producing music and cooking, too; you find talented artists or fine ingredients, and you try not to do too much!”

Satake considers his pieces for everyday tea drinking to be small works of sculpture, and he’s mostly satisfied with them. But the chawan is another matter.

“I practice the tea ceremony from time to time,” he says, “and I understand the philosophy behind it. But the chawan is the biggest challenge of anything I make. The shape, the color, the surface, everything goes into the keshiki (scenery) of the bowl. Every element is important, and you just can’t explain the combination. It’s like an old bluesman said in a documentary I saw: ‘What makes good blues? Man, you either got it or you don’t.’”

There’s a resonance between the inspired, intuitive knowingness that makes for a good chawan and the spirit of the tea ceremony itself, a ritual of relaxation and aesthetic appreciation that’s both formal and informal. There are set procedures for entering the tearoom, making the tea, and other elements of the ceremony. Yet it’s also a pleasant social occasion in which conversation is relaxed and real, and it’s meant to refresh the eye, the palate, and the spirit. It’s that fusion of the careful and the spontaneous that Satake works, and hopes, to put into every one of his chawan.

akirasatake.com | @akirasatake

Photo by Erin Adams

Portrait of Akira Satake.

Photo by Akira Satake

Satake’s Hikidashi Chawan, 2018, stoneware, 4 x 4.5 x 4.5 in.
Photo by Sayo Harris

Akira Satake adds dobe (mortar) onto the surface of a chawan, a bowl for sipping tea.

“Your thoughts matter, your days matter, your story matters enough to have a beautiful place to put it.”

— Megan Winn

Untangling Your Beautiful Story

Megan Winn, who creates opulent leather-bound journals, is a dedicated journal keeper. “There will be nights when I am going to bed but I feel like I can’t rest,” says the Indianapolis-based artist. “There’s something in my mind I can’t think through on my own. To get up and put pen to paper and just get it all out—it untangles those knots and then I feel like, okay, I got this. And then I can sleep. I’m an external processor, and I can sometimes do that through talking with my husband or friends, but there’s something intimate about being able to do it in the pages of my journal—with myself.”

Of course, it’s perfectly possible to journal in mass-produced spiral-bound notebooks, but in Winn’s case, the peace she attains from journaling is connected to the sensuous pleasure of making fine books. As a college student, she joined a women’s craft group in which another member was studying bookbinding. “She did a workshop for us, and that was the moment when I found my home as a maker,” she says. “I think it was . . . the tactile nature of it—I really love getting to make things with my hands—but it also felt like magic, making a book, this thing that I have loved my whole life.”

Her journals are eco-friendly, crafted from small batches of leftovers from a local leather distributor; and the paper is made to her specs, then shipped to her, by an Indian company that uses leftover cotton rags. She adds straps, clasps, and metal ornaments. These elements make for a journal that can become an heirloom. “They’re meant to last a lifetime or longer,” she says. “They’re meant to be handed down, if that’s what people choose to do.”

In fact, she adds, sometimes people are intimidated by the journals’ qualities. “They say, ‘Oh, I don’t have anything important enough to write in a book like that.’ My rebuttal is, ‘Of course you do.’ Your thoughts matter, your days matter, your story matters enough to have a beautiful place to put it.”

etsy.com/shop/bindingbee | @bindingbee_megan

Jon Spayde is a writer, editor, and performance artist in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Photo by Tim Winn

Portrait of Megan Winn.

Photo by Kelley Schuyler

Megan Winn holds a stack of her handbound journals, created using reclaimed leather, handmade cotton rag paper, and antique findings.

Photo by Megan Winn

The cover of Your Secret Is Safe With Me, 2020, latches with a working lock and key, 6 x 5 x 2 in.

Photo by Kelley Schuyler

Winn hand-binds a leather journal using the long-stitch method.

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Jo Andersson featured in The Queue.

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