I designed a ceramic cookie spoon and a ceramic cookie pool

Ceramic cookie pool and a cookie spoon.

The last quarterly ceramic mentorship project was all about Breaking Boundaries, where we were challenged to come up with a project that broke a “rule” in ceramics. Some students made a piece but did not fire it and placed it outside and let the elements degrade the clay. Another made a series of ceramic bricks using different decorative techniques, another put faces on mugs.

I focused on food because I love food, from trying all kinds of dishes to cooking, and I honestly struggled to think past ceramics as a functional thing, as some of my classmates did. But I still got to an interesting, if goofy, kind of place.

With functional ceramics, especially ceramic dishware, the ceramic is meant to be in service of the food, not the star of the show in its own right. What if the ceramic dish was the focus, was the star? What if… the ceramic was involved with the experience of eating in some way?

After much experimenting with candy (I devoured a whole bag of gummy worms while trying to design a piece that would make eating gummy worms more interesting than shoveling handfuls of sour sugary gooeyness in your mouth—as if such a thing exists!) I dreamed up the Cookie Pool.

Below are the results and the design inspiration for the final designs.

Four cookie pool designs

Design inspiration from David Hockney

Design inspiration from pools and lagoons

Cookie spoons

Loch Nesspoon atop a cookie pool

Thanks for reading! If you liked this post, checkout my Patreon, where I share more real time updates of studio projects. Or join my monthly newsletter for shop updates.