The Accidental Wheel
A single borrowed ceramics class in Long Beach became Sara Ekua Todd's life's work: sculptural clay in colors that seem to have been mixed rather than chosen.
Some vocations announce themselves slowly. Sara Ekua Todd's arrived through a discount coupon. A friend booked a one-time ceramics class near her home in Long Beach, California; Todd came along, sat down at the wheel that evening, and, as she later put it to Hunker, never stopped.
A multi-ethnic eye
The sensibility she brought to that wheel had been forming for decades. Raised in the Belgian countryside by a German mother and a Ghanaian father, Todd trained in photography and videography at art schools in Liège and Antwerp before settling in California in 2012. She managed a home goods shop and worked part-time jobs, throwing pots on the side, until 2020, when the studio became her work in full.
Her pieces carry that layered upbringing lightly. There is a European restraint in the forms and something altogether more exuberant in the palette. "I really love colors," she told Hunker, and her glazes bear it out: lavender, celadon, chartreuse, a soft blue she calls Cloud, and a metallic finish called Chrome.
Objects that ask to be used
Todd prototypes by hand and finishes most pieces on the wheel, though her most ambitious work is hand built. The Auvent Sconce, $1,150, is made, glazed and finished in her studio and wired with a slate blue cotton cord. The Petal Planter, thirteen inches of stoneware, is made to order over six to eight weeks.
Smaller pieces carry the same attention. The Soie Candle Holder, inspired, she writes, by the fluidity of silk, is a low form some fifteen inches across. The Isamu Dish, in speckled white porcelain, nods openly to the sculptor Isamu Noguchi. The Bow Hook, at $56, ties a ribbon of clay into something you might hang a coat on.
Her ambitions are domestic in the grandest sense. "I want to work on ceramic furniture, lighting, and other things for your home that you use every day," she has said. The exhibitions that have shown her work, from the A+D Museum's Impermanent Collection to Los Angeles Design Week's Forms of Living in 2025, suggest that the design world is listening.
Why it matters
There is a particular pleasure in objects whose maker plainly delights in them. Todd's clay has that quality. Each piece looks as though it was finished a moment ago, and as though the color was the first decision rather than the last.
