Meticulous. Maximalist. Imperfect.
Lamps and vessels in marbled and carved clay, hand-built slowly in Tantri Mustika’s studio in Carnegie, Melbourne.
New wallflowers
“painstaking handcrafted detail”
As featured in
THE MAKER
Tantri Mustika
Tantri found her first pottery wheel in hard rubbish on the way to the barbershop where she cut hair. Since then her practice has moved from market tables and fast production to slower, larger work, much of it in clay marbled until it looks like stone, or carved with florals that draw on the Balinese carving she grew up around.
“The work is a tool I’m using to rediscover myself. The more I lean into it, the more I see.”
A film by People Passion Place
In the studio
Tantri at work in her Carnegie studio.
Tantri’s techniques
Tantri spent years testing each of these until she knew it well. Now she puts them together in one piece, cutting carving into marbled clay or running gold lustre flames over nerikomi, and those combinations have become her signature.
-
UkiranCarving. The technique where Tantri began looking at her Balinese heritage, in flowers and flames cut by hand into stoneware.
-
MarmorealMarbling. Strips of marbled clay over full, curving forms, and the work where she grew confident with marbled clay as a surface.
-
NerikomiLayering. The Japanese technique that changed how Tantri marbles clay, with coloured clays stacked and sliced so the pattern runs right through.
-
TerrazzoInlay. Fragments of coloured clay set through each slab, where Tantri’s fascination with making clay look like stone began.
Melbourne Design Week 2025
Flow State
As the most complex work she has made to date, Flow State came together through repeated trial and error. Every ceramic element in the stack was hand-built, and forms were remade as she went.
Read the full story“My best work comes when I am fully immersed, when attention narrows, time falls away and I can follow the material without forcing it.”
Tantri Mustika
Commissions
Made just for you
Tantri takes commissions from private clients, interior designers and commercial spaces. Each piece is designed around the room it’s going into, and she starts by asking how the light falls there.
-
Conversation
Your brief, the space, a first concept, and a deposit to hold your place.
-
Design
Clay, colour, surface and scale worked out in detail, then your sign-off.
-
Making
Building, carving, glazing and firing, with updates from the studio along the way.
-
Delivery
A final check, careful packing, and delivery.
Commissions take 16–20 weeks from first conversation to delivery.