OXUM

07/27/2026

Continue the cycle. Nourish.

07/27/2026

What is craft?
I’ve been thinking about craft beyond technique, beauty, and the handmade object itself.

At its deepest, craft carries knowledge, shapes daily life, creates meaning, forms relationships, and passes something forward.

That is the territory my work lives in: the forms and rituals through which individual lives become a shared life.

07/27/2026

What if painting could reveal how the world forms, rather than simply how it looks?

I began exploring this question during a beginner abstract painting course through RISD Continuing Education. Since then, I’ve become increasingly interested in the ways minerals, water, gravity, and time shape the earth.

This painting is part of that exploration—an inquiry into formation and the knowledge held within materials.

I’m fascinated in what materials know, and what they can teach us when we learn to work with them — similarly to how porcelain and I work together ;)

— Niovi

07/20/2026

07/16/2026

What Holds Us
takes shape in daily life.

Through the objects we live with.
Through the rituals we repeat.
Through the ways we gather, remember, care,
and return to one another.

Over time, these gestures become
the architecture of a life.

They root us.
They mark us.
They shape what we carry
in the body, in memory,
in place, and in material.

Simple.
Ancient.
Deeply human. #

07/10/2026

What holds us is not always what we can name. It is what continues to root us, shape us, and hold us strong.

Join me this weekend at Spring Street Gallery for What Holds Us — an exhibition of porcelain works and the beginning of my journey into fine art, exploring material, memory, nature, and human connection.

I’ll share a few thoughts on Saturday at 5:30 p.m. about the ideas behind the work and the question at the center of it all: what holds us?

06/30/2026

Everything in nature exists in relationship.

Perhaps that’s why we feel most human when we do, too.

Life. Shared.

06/27/2026

Craft is where belief becomes physical.

For me, authenticity is not a look, a style, a declaration, or a perfectly curated life. It is a relationship we keep tending — a practice of returning, again and again, to what we value and to the life we are willing to build around it.

Craft has the power to bring us back to the parts of ourselves that have been overshadowed by the speed of progress.

The desire to make with our hands is deeply human. So is the need to connect with one another.

That is why I keep returning to craft: to the hand, the object, the ritual, the meal shared, and the life we are willing to build around what we value.

I wrote more about this in the OXUM journal:
What Does It Mean to Live Authentically?
Link in bio.

With care,
Niovi

06/19/2026

Some objects are designed. Others are discovered. ___________________________When I first discovered the technique I use to create these vessels, I finally understood the meaning of the phrase ‘an object born, not made.’

As makers, we often begin with an intention. We imagine a form. We picture an outcome. But this process asks for something different. It asks for participation rather than control.

The material moves. The maker responds.

What emerges is neither entirely designed nor entirely accidental. It is the result of a conversation between hand, material, gravity, and time.

I still remember the afternoon I made the first vessel. I stood there in awe, watching patterns and forms appear that I could never have drawn or planned. The object seemed to arrive on its own, as if it had been waiting to reveal itself.

That experience changed something for me.

Rather than producing these pieces to sell, I chose to teach the process instead. The real value for me is not the object itself. It is witnessing the moments when control gives way to curiosity, and something unexpected comes to life before your eyes.

Every vessel is unique.

Not because the maker tries to make it different, but because no two conversations with a material are ever the same.

06/16/2026

Connection is possible.