Her Ceramics Are As Imaginative As Her 'adventure Time' Storyboard Art - Beritaja

Artist Ako Castuera is champion known for her activity connected the award-winning animated bid “Adventure Time.” As a writer and storyboard artist, she helped intrepid heroes Jake the Dog and Finn the Human go iconic toon characters.

Though she brought flying rainbow unicorns and a platoon of plotting penguins to life connected screen, there’s much to Castuera’s resume than hyper-imaginative animation.

Ceramist, writer and storyboard creator Ako Castuera successful her studio.

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

The Echo Park-based imaginative is besides a professional ceramicist whose hand-built vessels and sculptures person been connected show astatine the Japanese American National Museum of Art, Oxy Arts and the Oakland Museum of Art.

In this series, we item independent makers and artists, from glassblowers to fibre artists, who are creating original products successful and about Los Angeles.

While Castuera’s workplace is filled pinch its adjacent stock of playful “Pee-wee’s Playhouse”-themed ceramic charms and anthropomorphic banana figurines, her trade is conscionable arsenic overmuch devoted to highlighting Southern California’s earthy resources and Indigenous people, arsenic good arsenic her ain Mexican-Japanese heritage.

“‘Whimsy’ is simply a connection that’s been applied to my activity a lot. This is not my word,” she said during a caller circuit of the Monrovia workspace she shares pinch her husband, creator Rob Sato, and chap ceramicist Rosie Brand.

“Not that whimsy is negative, but I do consciousness for illustration it doesn’t really get a grip connected the constituent of what I consciousness I’m moving with, arsenic acold arsenic the extent of the clay, the extent of the experience, of the land.”

She sat perched connected a stool astatine her workbench, utilizing a soft chromatic to grind ungraded clumps into good particulate arsenic she talked. She collects the reddish world during quality walks about the San Gabriel Mountains area — whether the riverbed of the Arroyo Seco, aliases the foothills of Claremont, her hometown.

“This is typical dirt,” she explained.

To her, it has a presence, a life of its ain and a cherished history. She uses it to make thing from trinket boxes to ornate geometric vases to statuettes of quizzical creatures.

Some of her about caller creations guidelines connected a adjacent woody shelf. They’re ceramic depictions of Pacific character frogs and awesome herons, some denizens of the L.A. River. The waterway has agelong been a root of inspiration for Castuera.

Ako Castuera’s activity ranges from monolithic pieces to the miniature, for illustration these figurines.

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

“I emotion the L.A. River,” she said. “It’s my neighbor. It’s my teacher. It’s a spot wherever I locomotion and bike.”

She regards the stream arsenic a muse and wants to animate Angelenos of each ages to admit it. To that end, she teaches younker workshops astatine the riverside arts hubs Clockshop and Sooki Studio. What’s more, the stream was a “main character” connected “City of Ghosts,” the L.A.-celebrating, Emmy-winning Netflix animated bid she directed. She’s moreover been known to usage immoderate of its h2o to toggle shape ungraded into moldable clay.

“The much group who are brought into a consciousness of kinship pinch the river, the better,” she said. “Because then, they really consciousness for illustration ‘The stream takes attraction of me; I want to return attraction of the river.’”

Castuera’s activity has an anthropological bent, arsenic good arsenic an ecological one. For example, her investigation into Southern California’s Kumeyaay and Cahuilla Indigenous tribes inspired a bid of ample jars patterned aft ollas, accepted pots utilized for h2o and seed storage. She plans to incorporated these jars into an immersive installation that will beryllium connected position astatine the Candlewood Arts Festival in Borrego Springs successful March and April. And past fall, she hosted a organization arena pinch Los Angeles Nomadic Division successful which she discussed really ungraded played a captious domiciled successful the societies of some the Gabrielino-Tongva tribes of L.A. and the Ryukyuan group of her mother’s autochthonal Okinawa.

Finding the saccharine spot wherever cultures harvester is simply a changeless root of information for Castuera. She’s created her ain twist connected shisa, lion-dog statues that are communal sights each about Okinawa. And she’s presently moving connected a postulation of mini sculptures honoring her patrilineal ties to Puebla, Mexico. Her “taco babies” were inspired by 1 of the region’s best-known dishes, tacos árabes, which harvester flavors from Mexico and the Middle East.

“I was reasoning about the beauty of being successful a surviving operation and what that would look for illustration personified,” she said of the wee figures wrapped successful colorful tortilla-like blankets.

Ako Castuera makes ceramics for the emotion of the process, not the last product.

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times)

Some of Castuera’s activity makes it into assemblage shows and immoderate she sells. But conscionable arsenic often, she smashes it and takes the ungraded backmost to wherever she primitively recovered it. It’s a wont of creating and destroying that she formed arsenic a student astatine Claremont High School, wherever she studied the trade for 2 semesters, yet fired zero pieces.

“I don’t deliberation I could’ve articulated this astatine 15, but it’s about the process of building, not the process of creating a product. It’s about moving pinch the worldly — conscionable making the abstraction and the clip for that practice,” she said.

“The excitement and the magic is really about the find of the unexpected. It’s truthful engrossing and it really conscionable gets maine engaged pinch life.”