Living on Lava: How the Big Island Shaped My Pottery Practice
There is a smell the Big Island has after rain. If you've never experienced it, it's hard to describe — earthy and mineral and just slightly sulfuric, rising from the ground itself. I lived with that smell for three years, and it worked its way into everything I made.
I moved to Leilani Estates in Hilo in my early years as a potter. I already had a practice — I had grown up in Kyoto, where silence and craftsmanship are practically in the air — but Hawaii was where I showed up to clay every single day. No excuses. No skipping. The studio was small, the wheel was always there, and the island had a way of making everything feel more present.
The Eruption, and Why We Stayed
In 2018, Kīlauea erupted. Leilani Estates, the neighborhood where I lived, was at the center of it.
If you followed the news that year, you saw the dramatic footage: Fissure 8, the most active vent, sending lava rivers through neighborhoods and into the ocean. What the cameras didn't always show was what it felt like to live near it — the ground trembling in the middle of the night, the orange glow on the horizon, the neighbors who had been there for twenty or thirty years standing in their driveways watching parts of their lives disappear.
I stayed. Some people couldn't understand that, but the island had given me too much to leave when things got hard. My neighbors' stories from those months — the things they lost, the things they chose to carry out, the strange beauty they described even in the worst of it — stayed with me in a way I still feel when I'm at the wheel.
After the eruption quieted, the land held onto what had happened. Steam rose from cracks in the ground on rainy mornings. The earth smelled different. There was an energy there that hadn't existed before, or maybe it had always been there and the eruption just made it impossible to ignore.
Lava Colors and What They Did to My Glazes
I'm not a literal translator. I don't set out to make a cup that looks like a photograph of lava. But the colors from that period became part of how I see.
Fissure 8 had this particular quality of light: deep black crust with veins of burning orange and deep red, the kind of color that looks almost impossible in nature. Underneath, everything was moving. It was violent and alive and, in a strange way, beautiful.
Years later, I'm working on a cup that references those colors directly. Molten orange transitioning into volcanic black, with a texture in the clay surface that tries to hold some of that raw energy. It's taking time to get right — glaze chemistry doesn't always cooperate with memory — but I know exactly what I'm reaching for.
The broader influence on my work is harder to pin down but more pervasive. Hawaii loosened something in my glaze work. The muted, refined palette I had been working with in a Japanese aesthetic started to include something warmer, more elemental. Ocean blues and hibiscus pinks came first. The volcanic tones came later, slower. They're still coming.
Three Years of Daily Practice
The most important thing Hawaii gave me wasn't the color inspiration. It was the discipline.
I threw on the wheel every day. I sold work at a local art store in Hilo. I failed a lot — glaze tests that didn't fire the way I expected, forms that collapsed, firings where I opened the kiln and found nothing worth keeping. And I kept going anyway, because the island made it easy to believe that making things with your hands was a worthwhile way to spend a life.
That three-year practice is why The Way of Clay exists. The aesthetic is Japanese; the warmth in it is Hawaiian; the intention behind it is something I've been building since those mornings in Leilani, when the ground was still steaming and I had a cup of tea in my hand and work waiting on the wheel.
Life as Material
I think of my life as the raw material of my pottery. Not in a self-indulgent way — the pieces don't come with explanatory notes — but in the sense that where I've been shows up in what I make, whether I intend it to or not.
Kyoto gave me proportion and restraint. Hawaii gave me color and presence and a respect for what the earth actually does when it moves. Both are in everything I throw now.
The Fissure 8 cup isn't finished yet. When it is, it will hold tea or matcha or whatever you want it to hold, and most people won't know its story. That's fine. The object carries the experience whether or not you can name it.
That's what pottery does.
Mari is a handmade pottery artist based in Marina del Rey, California. She makes matcha bowls, mugs, plates, and more — each piece shaped by years of daily studio practice across Kyoto, the Big Island of Hawaii, and Okinawa. Shop the current collection at thewayofclay.net.
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