Rose Orenbuch

I started making ceramics in the fall of 2024. Before that, I had been drawing and painting for as long as I can remember — graphite, charcoal, pen, watercolor, digital — almost always flora and fauna. The same subjects I drew as a child in the woods are the ones I now paint on clay.

The pieces I make are primarily white stoneware and porcelain, decorated with flashing slips and black underglaze, and fired in a soda kiln. Soda firing is an atmospheric process: sodium is introduced into the kiln at high temperature and volatilizes, moving through the chamber and settling on surfaces, creating a glaze where it lands. The same slip mutates depending on where a piece sits — amber and warm near the flame, cooler and muted in shadow.

One of my favorite types of decoration is underglaze hand-painted before firing. Trailing vines. Lilies mid-bloom. The crane mid-wingbeat caught between strokes. I draw from observation with attention to detail: the venation of a specific leaf, the segmentation of an insect’s body, the way a flower opens in stages.

I draw from a wide range of ceramic traditions — Greek, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Japanese — and from Islamic metalwork. What draws me to these objects is not their age or rarity but their ornamentation: someone decided a vessel for daily use deserved to be beautiful. Handles elaborated beyond function. Forms pushed into unusual proportions. Surfaces covered in motifs for no reason other than that pattern is pleasurable.

Rose Orenbuch is a postdoctoral computational biologist based in Boston, Massachusetts. She received her PhD from Harvard University in Systems Biology.