Healing hands: artist Dina Nur Satt

In 2017, she took the leap and established her own practice, Nur Ceramics, but it wasn’t easy. “I started pitching pieces to all these different stores, but didn’t get much of a response. I felt like there was a glass ceiling there.” It was only following the tragic death of George Floyd a year later that the landscape changed. “I had almost decided to stop making ceramics, then the Black Lives Matter movement happened and all of a sudden there was a wave of interest in my work. Stores that I’d previously pitched to were reaching out to ask me to produce the same work I’d pitched a year before.”  

Thankfully, Satti’s practice has grown steadily since, and this growth has given her space both to experiment and hone her craft. “I started out with the electric wheel because that’s what is usually taught,” she explains. “I liked it, but I didn’t feel a deep connection with it. Then, I traveled to Sudan, Kenya and Ethiopia. In Ethiopia, I met with a group of Jewish Falasha women who were keeping traditional ceramic traditions alive. Visiting them changed the narrative I had in my mind. We’re taught that to create symmetrical ceramics you need to use the wheel, but they were ‘coil-building’ pieces by hand, using long snakes of clay. I watched them make six to eight feet tall pieces that were perfectly symmetrical. It changed my brain chemistry.”  

Today, if you order a piece from Nur Ceramics, it’ll have been created the same way, with Satti painstakingly creating the elaborate, sculptural shapes she’s known for by hand, using thin coils of clay that are painstakingly layered together, finessed and blended into a single form. 

When it comes to commissions, Satti likes to take in a brief and then be given the freedom to create what feels right for her clients. “I’ll just try to understand what kind of piece you’re interested in,” she says. “Is it a piece of furniture? Is it ornamental? What purpose is it going to serve? Then I create small models of it at first, so we can discuss the glaze and finish. It’s a collaborative process, but it’s still very much me creating the piece that I want to be creating.” 

Clearly, it works. Satti has finished two high-profile artists’ residencies. One was at Saint Heron, Solange Knowles’s gallery, which hosted the first ceramics residency for all- black women in New York. The other was at Palm Heights in Grand Cayman. 

What’s next for Nur Ceramics? “I teach at a studio called Gasworks in Brooklyn,” Satti says. “One of the owners used to be an art therapist. Having a ceramics business is one thing, but watching other people have breakthroughs and ‘aha’ moments through working with clay has been amazing. When you work with it, the clay calls on you to shed light on the parts of yourself that need working on. I want to help more people to do that.”

Explore Dina Nur Satti’s work at nurceramics.com or on Instagram @nurceramics. To discuss a commission, email studio@nurceramics.com