Her ceramics are as imaginative as her 'Adventure Time' storyboard art

Artist Ako Castuera is champion known for her enactment 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 beingness 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 originative is besides a nonrecreational 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 autarkic makers and artists, from glassblowers to fibre artists, who are creating archetypal products successful and astir Los Angeles.

While Castuera’s workplace is filled with its just 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 enactment a lot. This is not my word,” she said during a caller circuit of the Monrovia workspace she shares with her husband, creator Rob Sato, and chap ceramicist Rosie Brand.

“Not that whimsy is negative, but I bash consciousness similar it doesn’t truly get a grip connected the substance 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 creaseless chromatic to grind ungraded clumps into good particulate arsenic she talked. She collects the reddish world during quality walks astir the San Gabriel Mountains country — whether the riverbed of the Arroyo Seco, oregon the foothills of Claremont, her hometown.

“This is peculiar dirt,” she explained.

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

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

Ako Castuera’s enactment ranges from monolithic pieces to the miniature, similar 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 adjacent been known to usage immoderate of its h2o to alteration ungraded into moldable clay.

“The much radical who are brought into a consciousness of kinship with the river, the better,” she said. “Because then, they truly consciousness similar ‘The stream takes attraction of me; I privation to instrumentality attraction of the river.’”

Castuera’s enactment has an anthropological bent, arsenic good arsenic an ecological one. For example, her probe into Southern California’s Kumeyaay and Cahuilla Indigenous tribes inspired a bid of ample jars patterned aft ollas, accepted pots utilized for h2o and effect storage. She plans to incorporated these jars into an immersive installation that volition beryllium connected presumption astatine the Candlewood Arts Festival successful Borrego Springs successful March and April. And past fall, she hosted a assemblage lawsuit with Los Angeles Nomadic Division successful which she discussed however ungraded played a captious relation successful the societies of some the Gabrielino-Tongva tribes of L.A. and the Ryukyuan radical 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 astir Okinawa. And she’s presently moving connected a postulation of tiny 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 astir the quality of being successful a surviving premix and what that would look similar 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 enactment 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 pupil 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 astir the process of building, not the process of creating a product. It’s astir moving with the worldly — conscionable making the abstraction and the clip for that practice,” she said.

“The excitement and the magic is truly astir the find of the unexpected. It’s truthful engrossing and it truly conscionable gets maine engaged with life.”