Interview: Damla Aygun by journalist Rachel Douglass

In June 2026, journalist Rachel Douglass visited Studio RAVA at Treehouse NDSM for a conversation about clay, ritual, and making. The full transcript follows.

Can you introduce yourself and tell us a little bit about your work?

Hi, my name is Damla. I'm a ceramic artist and the founder of Studio RAVA. The word RAVA comes from Ursula Le Guin's book Always Coming Home. She's my favourite writer. RAVA means communication without words. For me, this is what clay is. It's a language that is not spoken, but felt through touch and presence.

We are surrounded by things screaming for our attention: 5am morning routines, news from everywhere, three-second videos we scroll through all day. My work is a kind of quiet resistance to that. It's about touch, slowing down, and paying attention to details. It requires you to sit down with a material that doesn't rush.

I first shape my pieces on a wheel or through hand-building. I like to combine both. Then I carve into the piece. It's a very slow process. I fill the carvings with coloured, textured clay. You need to manage the tension between two materials, and I really enjoy that. The process is called inlaying.

I'm inspired by a Korean technique called Buncheong, which dates back to the 15th century. I interpret it through my own experience and a more contemporary lens. This technique brings the focus to the process rather than only the final object, and I think that's one of the rarest things in our day-to-day lives.

What first drew you to clay as a material, and how has your personal background shaped your artwork?

I have a specific memory of clay. My first experience actually comes from childhood. I was playing around the house, and we had these red fragments of earthenware all around. My friends and I used to take them, mix them with water, and build dollhouses. It was a really bright colour, so we would also paint all the walls with it. The neighbours were not very happy about that. This is my very first memory of touching clay and simply playing.

Years later, after I graduated from university, I was working in a demanding job and struggling a little psychologically. I found myself stepping into a ceramic studio in my neighbourhood. There was a really talented sculptor giving courses there, and I remember that as soon as I touched the clay, all the noise in my mind went completely silent. I was surprised by that feeling. Since then, I just didn't stop.

I'm originally from Istanbul, Turkey, and I come from a family of makers. Someone was weaving, someone was making clothes, someone was cooking, someone was making mosaics. I have these memories of my grandmother sitting by the fire, knitting socks for us. The family was big and loud, but emotions were not spoken about that much. She would sit there silently knitting, but through the way her hands moved, we understood how much she loved us.

My father is a pastry chef who used to make sculptures out of sugar, edible sculptures for chef's competitions. One day he brought home an Eiffel Tower he was working on out of sugar. I was fascinated. The next morning, I woke up early while everyone was sleeping and started licking it. It's still my little secret that he took that sculpture to a competition and won. That was the one I licked.

I didn't study art in school. I graduated from a technical university studying management engineering and did a master's in innovation management. That gave me a good foundation in systems thinking and design thinking. I was also good at technical drawing, which helped a lot when thinking in three dimensions. I needed to educate myself and gain experience with clay, ceramics and art. I'm still learning, this is still very much ongoing.

How else do your interests and experiences feed into the way you work with clay?

Not many people know this, but I'm also a rock climber. I've been climbing for around ten years and used to give lessons voluntarily to young people. Rock climbing and working with clay have real similarities, both are about your body and how you approach something. If you're tense, it shows. In climbing and in the clay. It reflects your state of mind. My family, my education, my hobbies and my ceramics, they're all connecting the dots for me.

During your time at Treehouse Amsterdam, how has this environment, and the shared artistic environment specifically, shaped or challenged your way of making?

Before Treehouse, I worked in different community ceramic studios. It was really nice, but the question I was asking myself changed. It stopped being "Am I improving technically? What do I make next" and became "What am I bringing into this world, and why? What does it say to people?" Having my own studio here has helped me start to find fragments of answers I'm trying to put into my sculptures.

When I leave my studio, I might see a fragment of a painting through another artist's window and think, wow. I might walk into the cantina and hear someone playing piano. Being surrounded by visual artists, musicians, everyone working on their own things but also collectively creating exhibitions and events, this is something you cannot experience just sitting in your own studio. This community inspires my work and motivates me to challenge myself.

How has moving between different places, communities and cultural contexts influenced the way you think about Clay and Rituals specifically?

Moving between countries changes a lot, the food you eat, the language you speak, the people around you. Right now I'm speaking English, which I'm not 100% comfortable with, and that creates some tension in my life. Moving between places has created that feeling of needing to rebuild my connection, to feel safe and at home again.

I’m also trying to bring that ritual into my work. Coming to this studio, sitting down here, working on something, going out to see other artists, it's become a grounding feeling. I always brew a slow coffee when I step in and lay out all my tools on my desk. My friends make fun of me for being so organised, but it's not really about organising. It's about telling your body: this moment is chosen for this. It's my way of creating a bubble with an intention for creativity. This is how I realised that ritual helps me to feel grounded, to feel at home again and to be able to open all my channels for what I’m doing right now.

I wanted to share that feeling with other people. Being in a state of flow is something precious that we can't find all the time. This is how the Clay & Ritual workshop idea started.

Can you talk us through what people can expect from the Clay and Rituals workshop? What do you hope people take away from it?

We don't touch the clay immediately. We start with some context. Clay and Ritual have been together since the beginning of humanity. The first clay objects found by archaeologists date back tens of thousands of years. They are not food containers or water containers. They are human figurines made for rituals and offerings, for creating a feeling of belonging to something bigger than yourself.

That made me start asking: how do we bring that feeling into our days? The ritual here is not religious or spiritual in a fixed sense. It's your own way of asking: what do I expect from my day? How do I approach this with intention? What do I want more of for myself? Then, using guided questions, I help people design their own objects for a specific moment in their day. Finally, we touch the clay and I show some hand-building techniques based on what people want to make.

Usually when people arrive they have an idea in their mind. Sometimes it’s a picture from Pinterest, and they say, “Oh, I want to make this exactly.” But when you're touching clay for the first time, it's a challenge to make exactly what you imagined. What I really love watching is what happens after about half an hour: people let go of the perfect image they had at the start. It turns into the hands taking over from the mind. The voices in the studio slow down, the hands get faster, and then they are really into it.

This is something that I want to share with more people because, the object they take home is not just something to put on a shelf. It becomes the carrier of that feeling, of the language clay spoke to them during the workshop. I hope it becomes a reminder, so they can have more of that feeling in their everyday lives.

Where can people find the workshop, and when is the next session?

I’d like to invite people who are interested in the workshop to the next session, which will be on 20 June here at Treehouse, at NDSM in Amsterdam. We start at 1:30 pm, and it usually takes around three hours. I’m also planning to hold one session every month. You can find the upcoming sessions on my website, Ravaceramics.com/workshops.