Emily Morton's Ceramic Oasis
A sanctuary crafted from global roots to desert blooms
Nestled in the rugged landscape of Landers, California, just north of Joshua Tree, Emily Morton's ceramics studio, Sanctuary Ceramics, stands as a testament to a life beaming with art and adaptation.
Emily was born in Borneo, a remote Indonesian island, and spent her childhood in four different countries. Even as her surroundings shifted from city to city, Emily’s world was filled with an incredible art education, cultivating a passion to make. A striking memory from this time is during her second-grade in Saudi Arabia, where her engineer father constructed a kiln at her school, introducing her to ceramics. Her mother still treasures a small toothpick holder Emily made then.
Outside of school, she was inspired by seeing people exploring their creativity through art, music, dance and more. Her international experiences profoundly shaped her perspective on art as Emily recounts, “Growing up overseas, there are so many people making art and making a living from it. That’s not really the culture here [in the US]. If you're going to be an artist, you're starving artist, or you're eccentric, or you're a graphic designer or doing more commercial art. And seeing that I think has had a really big impact on why I'm doing this”.
Emily pursued her higher education in Florida, graduating with a major in art education and a minor in ceramics. Post-graduation, she was a public school art school teacher in LA, teaching kids as young as Kindergarten and up through high school. Emily wanted to foster the same passion for art in the next generation as she had seen through her time around the world as a child. What she didn’t expect was her fifteen career would be as much of an education for her as it was for her students, “I learned so much teaching kids. The experience has informed my practice from experimenting to being open to new ideas to making mistakes along the way”, reflected Emily. Throughout this time, she continued her work in ceramics, joining a community studio and even establishing a makeshift studio in her apartment with a kiln in her driveway.
When the pandemic hit and her job went remote, she and her husband moved to their home in Landers in the Mojave Desert. A year into being a remote art teacher, Emily decided it was time for a change and felt a natural transition to ceramics full time.
The desert is Emily’s muse. The sandy hues of the clay, the yellow and green shades drawn from the native creosote bush, and the soft pink borrowed from cactus flowers are featured prominently in her pieces. Her earthy, organic color palette is juxtaposed with her other source of inspiration - the grid. “I need a bit of structure to get started. I sketch a grid on a piece and then connect lines or add curves.” shared Emily about her meditative process. “Sometimes it is an abstraction of something in my space, but I don’t start there”.
Emily has a new studio housed in a quonset hut, built with the help of her ever so supportive (and handy!) dad. This new space is poised to bring a new wave of perspective and inspiration. Emily is tuned into the connection between her art and environment and is reminded of her childhood moving into different cultures and countries. “If you grew up with the same set of people your whole life, you’re stuck in this version of you. I moved every few years, so I was always like, okay now I can be like this if I want to. When I was in LA, I had this environmental circumstance and I made that work [for my ceramics]. Coming out here, I have all this space and am looking forward to how that’ll change my work”.
As do we.
You can find Emily’s studio, Sanctuary Ceramics, on Instagram and shop her pieces on Etsy.
All photos courtesy Brain Fog Studio