After ‘Adventure Time,’ Ako Castuera focuses on ceramics

Artist Ako Castuera is greatest recognized for her work on the award-winning animated sequence “Adventure Time.” As a author and storyboard artist, she helped intrepid heroes Jake the Dog and Finn the Human turn into iconic toon characters.

Though she introduced flying rainbow unicorns and a platoon of plotting penguins to life on display screen, there’s extra to Castuera’s resume than hyper-imaginative animation.

The Echo Park-based inventive can be a professional ceramicist whose hand-built vessels and sculptures have been on show on the Japanese American National Museum of Art, Oxy Arts and the Oakland Museum of Art.

While Castuera’s studio is crammed with its fair proportion of playful “Pee-wee’s Playhouse”-themed ceramic charms and anthropomorphic banana collectible figurines, her craft is simply as a lot dedicated to highlighting Southern California’s pure sources and Indigenous individuals, in addition to her personal Mexican-Japanese heritage.

“‘Whimsy’ is a word that’s been applied to my work a lot. This is not my word,” she mentioned throughout a latest tour of the Monrovia workspace she shares together with her husband, artist Rob Sato, and fellow ceramicist Rosie Brand.

“Not that whimsy is negative, but I do feel like it doesn’t really get a handle on the substance of what I feel I’m working with, as far as the depth of the clay, the depth of the experience, of the land.”

She sat perched on a stool at her workbench, utilizing a easy stone to grind soil clumps into tremendous mud as she talked. She collects the pink earth throughout nature walks across the San Gabriel Mountains space — whether or not the riverbed of the Arroyo Seco, or the foothills of Claremont, her hometown.

“This is special dirt,” she defined.

To her, it has a presence, a lifetime of its personal and a cherished historical past. She makes use of it to make something from trinket bins to ornate geometric vases to statuettes of quizzical creatures.

Some of her most up-to-date creations stand on a close-by wood shelf. They’re ceramic depictions of Pacific tree frogs and nice herons, each denizens of the L.A. River. The waterway has lengthy been a supply of inspiration for Castuera.

“I love the L.A. River,” she mentioned. “It’s my neighbor. It’s my teacher. It’s a place where I walk and bike.”

She regards the river as a muse and desires to encourage Angelenos of all ages to understand it. To that finish, she teaches youth workshops on the riverside arts hubs Clockshop and Sooki Studio. What’s extra, the river was a “main character” on “City of Ghosts,” the L.A.-celebrating, Emmy-winning Netflix animated sequence she directed. She’s even been recognized to make use of a few of its water to remodel soil into moldable clay.

“The more people who are brought into a sense of kinship with the river, the better,” she mentioned. “Because then, they really feel like ‘The river takes care of me; I want to take care of the river.’”

Castuera’s work has an anthropological bent, in addition to an ecological one. For instance, her analysis into Southern California’s Kumeyaay and Cahuilla Indigenous tribes impressed a sequence of enormous jars patterned after ollas, conventional pots used for water and seed storage. She plans to include these jars into an immersive set up that might be on view on the Candlewood Arts Festival in Borrego Springs in March and April. And final fall, she hosted a neighborhood occasion with Los Angeles Nomadic Division during which she mentioned how soil performed an important position within the societies of each the Gabrielino-Tongva tribes of L.A. and the Ryukyuan people of her mother’s native Okinawa.

Finding the candy spot the place cultures mix is a continuing supply of motivation for Castuera. She’s created her personal twist on shisa, lion-dog statues which are frequent sights throughout Okinawa. And she’s at the moment engaged on a group of small sculptures honoring her patrilineal ties to Puebla, Mexico. Her “taco babies” have been impressed by one of many area’s best-known dishes, tacos árabes, which mix flavors from Mexico and the Middle East.

“I was thinking about the beauty of being in a living mix and what that would look like personified,” she mentioned of the wee figures wrapped in colourful tortilla-like blankets.

Some of Castuera’s work makes it into gallery reveals and a few she sells. But simply as typically, she smashes it and takes the soil again to the place she initially discovered it. It’s a behavior of making and destroying that she fashioned as a pupil at Claremont High School, the place she studied the craft for 2 semesters, but fired zero items.

“I don’t think I could’ve articulated this at 15, but it’s about the process of building, not the process of creating a product. It’s about working with the material — just making the space and the time for that practice,” she mentioned.

“The excitement and the magic is really about the discovery of the unexpected. It’s so engrossing and it really just gets me engaged with life.”