Get to know the Barcelona-based ceramicist behind Mari Masot

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30th Oct 2019

How does one reinvent the wheel of an ancient art harking back to 4000BC? Just ask 39-year-old Marissa McInturff, the ceramicist who threw caution to the wind and replaced it with clay when she moved to New York from Barcelona in 2014  after meeting her now-husband on a work trip in 2011.

Originally from Bethesda, Maryland, McInturff, who studied architecture at university, picked up pottery while waiting for her work permit in Barcelona in order to continue food styling, though she never did. Gaining her bearings around the city, and the craft, she found each served as mutual wells of inspiration: ceramics provided a way to channel her interests in design; Spain, with its rich profile of artists and architects from Antoni Gaudí to Joan Miró, proved a font of stimulation. And so, she launched her digital-native, made-to-order ceramics business Mari Masot, amassing nearly 4000 followers on Instagram to date.

Toying with colour, proportion and geometry, McInturff’s plant pots (though they’ll double as vases or standalone sculptures too) are uniquely convertible, with interchangeable parts that invite the user to make them their own. At times, they appear to riff off classical Doric columns or Tuscan orders, connecting the pieces to the ancient past before bright reds, yellows and blues rife for an Instagram age transplant them back to now.

With her references alone enough to generate excitement around her work (McInturff cites Ettore Sottsass, Le Corbusier and Alexander Gerard as key influences), Vogue Living probes the up-and-coming ceramicist about her process, the ways in which she maneuvers her clay to mimic the surrounding coastline, and why customer collaboration is key to reinvigorate an age-old medium. 

Image credit: Carlos Ojeda Jimenez

“[My work] is about Barcelona, it’s about Catalonia; the natural characteristics of it and this really vibrant art energy that’s here…. [They influence my choice of] sunbaked colours and these very naturally informed shapes,” explains McInturff over the phone to us. She adds: “Every medium I’ve ever worked with has been about where I am and what I’m absorbing from that place.

Three years ago, McInturff immersed herself in the ceramics studio – “I was there almost every day” – pulling from different design fields that piqued her interest and integrating these within her pottery. “Ettore Sottsass is somebody whose ceramic work I really love obviously,” she explains, citing Alexander Gerard and Georgia O’Keeffe as fundamental influences as well.

She continues: “One of my main inspirations is Charlotte Perriand who was a contemporary of Le Corbusier… She took these very rational geometries that were being advanced at the time and gave them an organic and very human feel and that’s really interesting to me. The pieces I make, I really like the hand-made quality; that they don’t look machine-made.”

McInturff credits the local clay at her disposal with helping to achieve this appearance. “[The clay found in Spain] was kind of a revelation… [it has] this really sandy texture which I love because I live by the beach; the coastline of this area is just so magical and beautiful and I love that my pieces reference that.” The texture correlates with her colour palette, too: “I love the way they come out in this slightly faded, very vibrant colour. And they’re absolutely matte. I was searching for this matte texture because I love the way the light and shadow reflect off it and change the shape of the piece.”

Like her process, which McInturff is hesitant to quantify — “I go through spurts of being in a prototyping mode… Everything I make is wheel thrown [and therefore] the medium itself and how it behaves really dictates what the piece is going to be” — she conceived her plant pots with a similar spontaneity. “I’m a big house plant person and I always felt like the design [of plant pots] was sort of an afterthought,” she explains. “I started doing these two-part plant pots with stands and tops that weren’t interchangeable, but found I and everyone else would switch them around. That’s when I realised I need to make that part of this and that’s been really fun.” 

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Image credit: Mari Masot

Keeping her ear to the ground and welcoming interaction has not only allowed room for her to play with product — it’s been a formative approach for the maker both on and offline. In step with her embrace of Instagram as a platform for promotion (most of her sales have come through the digital hub) — “in the ’40s, the art world was centered in Paris; in the ’70s it was in New York” — McInturff is hopeful her designs will facilitate buyers to engage with her pieces in a similar way.

“I like the element of ‘I create this thing that’s a sculptural thing, but it’s also a starting off point’. [Each plant pot] gets a new life. You can either plant something in it and a plant will grow and evolve or you can change the composition everyday,” she says, before adding: “It’s a collaboration: I create the structure and you take it from there.”