“It’s so easy to come up with a million excuses why you can’t do something,” says potter Marité Acosta, who’s transitioned, with enviable seamlessness, from a career in fashion and textile design to working as a chef and food stylist—and now, in the latest iteration of her creative reinvention, an acclaimed designer. “I had that moment—and I signed up for one [pottery] class and another and another, and finally someone said, ‘When are you going to become a studio potter?’”

“My pieces aren’t perfect.
I don’t care that they’re not perfect.
I think they’re beautiful in
not being perfect.”

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Acosta took that advice, setting up shop in a shared studio in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. She divides her time between focusing on clay and continuing her work with food, designing menus for private clients and displaying an enviable, intuitive ability to create tableaux with food (see her website [mariteacosta.com] for examples.) Still, it’s pottery that she sounds most bewitched by at the moment: “You start off with a ball of clay and there are so many steps that follow—and there are a million ways it can end up,” she says. “It’s very meditative. I wouldn’t say I’m infatuated with it, but I think about it all the time.”

Acosta’s profile rose quickly, thanks in part to a network of friends—food and prop stylists—who quickly recognized the beauty of her work and sought it out, but primarily to the rough-hewn elegance of her work, typically produced in neutral colors, matte or white; their beauty, as Acosta notes herself, is in their imperfections: “There are technical potters out there that can make the most perfect pieces,” she says. “I appreciate that and love that, but the things that come to me are the handmade stuff.”

“The first time I did the paintbrush texture,
there was a guy watching me,
looking at me like, ‘What are you about to do?’
And I just went: Whoosh.” 

_________

“There are technical potters
out there that can make the most perfect pieces.
I appreciate that and love that,
but the things that come to me are
the handmade stuff.”

_________

Photographed by Johnny Fogg

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