A full-time lawyer turned to a full-time studio potter, Arunima is a curious introverted person who loves long walks, the sound of rain, a steaming cup of chai, sweet treats, and most importantly, flowers!
Born and raised in Jamshedpur, she studied and worked in Gandhinagar, Mumbai, Delhi, and is now settled in Bangalore. She first touched clay in 2018 when she took up a hand-building course. This led to a wheel throwing course in 2019. In 2020, as Covid and the subsequent lockdown struck, she bought her wheel and finally got the time to explore and learn about pottery every day. A year down the line, she started taking orders from her friends and conducting workshops, and this is how Dhee Pottery took shape. As the volume of orders increased, she started working with more artisans and focussed on designing, illustrating, sketching, and painting.
‘Dhee’ also translates to design. “I wanted the name to be in Devanagiri script and reflect what I do”. It was all a labour of time, effort, patience, and love.“It takes time for your hand to understand clay! At the outset, progress is slow but as you spend more time on the wheel, you begin to see yourself create something. Throughout the whole process though, the clay has a way of demanding that you think solely about it,” she says.
A self-learned painter, her pieces reflect her love for florals. One can find ethereal botanicals, vivid flowers, and a range of Mughal to geometric patterns handpainted on her pieces. “Ceramics was always a canvas for me, I felt like something needed to be on it and I started hand-painting flowers on them as trees and blooms have endless inspiration in them!” Starting with monotones initially, she now tries to bring many beautiful shades of flowers to life on her wares. She sifts through floriculture or botany books to understand flowers and observes keenly to get their accurate appearance. “It’s all about the joy of seeing your vision come to life (a process of trial and error)!” Arunima paints each stroke on her wares with precision and care to bring the beauty of vivid blooms alive on her tableware. After all, it is always worth it to see nature’s most beautiful phenomena come to life on the dining tables
