From the lab bench to the potter's wheel

I'm Julia Khorolskaya, and JKClay is my studio just outside Berlin. My husband and I moved here from St. Petersburg in 2023. The clay came earlier — 2019 — and it has stayed with me since.

I came to ceramics as a biologist. I have a PhD and spent years at a lab bench before I ever centered a pot, and that turns out to matter more than I expected. A glaze is chemistry: a combination of minerals and oxides that only show themselves at 1250 °C, and often not how you predicted. Mixing, testing, keeping notes, changing one variable at a time, firing again — that is the part of the work I love most, and it is the part a scientist is unusually well prepared for.

So my studio reads a little like a set of experiments. You'll find the same shapes in several glazes, and small collections that grew out of one result worth repeating. I work in small batches rather than one-offs, which means a piece you like can usually come back.

If you find a shape you want in a glaze from a different collection, write me — I would be glad to make it.

I make things meant to be used: the mug you reach for first in the morning, the bowl that ends up on the table every day. I hope something here becomes that for you.