Cups purchased can be picked up or shipped after the exhibition closes on December 8th, 2025.
Hand-built ceramic with custom glaze
5.5" × 5.5" × 3.5"
2025
Mariia Orlova (Orel) is a ceramic artist working at the intersection of sculpture, design, and tactile narrative. Originally from Russia, she now lives and works in New Orleans, where the climate, textures, and cultural rhythms of the South have deeply influenced her visual language.
Trained through a decade of hands-on practice and independent studio work, Mariia’s journey began with utilitarian ceramics and evolved into sculptural vessels, wall panels, and object-based forms.
Her core themes are fragmentation, memory, and assembling wholeness from the disparate. She explores how broken or layered experiences — cultural, personal, embodied — can form a living, unified surface. As an immigrant, queer woman, and traveler, she continually reconstructs herself from fragments — and carries that process into clay.
This path led her to a shared ground beneath difference: earth, soil, mineral. Clay becomes both material and metaphor — a body that remembers, records, holds.
Mariia treats surface as a field of memory. She looks at texture like under a microscope — where cracks, stress lines, and imprints aren’t flaws but signs of life.
Her process is entirely hand-built: coiling, assembling, altering. She works with stoneware and porcelain, uses her own glazes — matte, volcanic, ash-like — and sometimes incorporates wood, steel, or mirror in larger pieces. Her surfaces evoke bark, dust, and weathered stone.
The heat, humidity, oak trees, and patinaed facades of New Orleans have entered her inner vocabulary. For her, clay is a Southern material — weathered, grounded, slow, and full of memory.
