Botanica

Botanica is a guest designed collection by artist Cody Hoyt that weaves together the art forms of painting, printmaking, and ceramics. A self-taught master of the Japanese technique of nerikomi, by which differently colored clays are layered to form complex patterns, Hoyt inlays rather than paints vivacious florals into the foundation itself, shaping the clay into angular, faceted sculptural vessels. In this guest collection, we imagine the home as a vessel, in all its angles and corners, inverting the form of his sculptures and translating their layered compositions as a large-scale, non-repeating mural, dense with scattered flowers.

Within Hoyt’s work, patterns undulate within patterns, landscapes within landscapes, continuing rather than repeating in an orderly sort of chaos—not unlike nature’s own design. “Flowers feel like a combination of figuration and abstraction,” Hoyt says. “They become interchangeable. It’s natural to read some abstract patterns as florets. It’s natural to see flowers as pattern.” In Botanica, these embedded floral forms evoke a handful of petals thrown into the air, landing at random and yet stopped in time, pressed as though between pages of a book in the solid, monolithic ceramic.

The unpredictability of the ceramic medium itself, Hoyt says, is key to the merit of the finished result, too: “The chaotic parts of the process are very important. The way the clay cracks and changes during drying and firing is emblematic of the vitality of the material. It’s an artifact of the process that gives it a soul.”

In Botanica, Hoyt explores utility and tactility by physically constructing these motifs rather than sketching them out. They are forms with dimension, exploding through space, full of life and warmth—qualities this collection enhances in any home.