Julia Pilipchatina spent years working as an illustrator before she decided to take a wild leap of faith and give pottery a shot. She quickly fell in love with ceramics and started celebrating the beauty and fragility of the natural world through her delicate porcelain creations.
Pilipchatina hails from Kharkiv, Ukraine, but she was forced to flee her country and move to Belgium after the war broke out. She found a great creative outlet in pottery and started an Instagram page @tiletiletesto, where she’s followed by over 30,000 people.
Most pottery artists can’t imagine working without a wheel, but not Pilipchatina. She developed her own technique which includes hand-painting each piece before firing them up at extreme heat.
“The cycle consists of heating and cooling to room temperature, which means that one firing can last 12 hours. Since the paint is semi-transparent, achieving brightness, depth, and contrast requires many layers, and therefore many firings,” Pilipchatina told Colossal.
She enjoys exploring all sorts of themes through her work, but the beauty of the natural world and our place in it is her favorite subject. Birds and flowers are very common motifs in her work, along with insects, and she used her art to overcome her fear of these curious creators.
