Ceramic Face Planters Find Individuality in Each Imperfection

One of my favorite things on my desk is a small ceram­ic face ves­sel by Uno + Ichi.  The cup is a char­ac­ter with a tiny nose, mouth, eyes out­lined with big red glass­es. It brings me joy each time I look at it, which goes to show you the pow­er of cre­ative products.

Hana Ward is the per­son behind Uno + Ichi, although the brand was orig­i­nal­ly start­ed by her and her friend Joan­na in 2015. (Uno + Ichi means “one plus one,” as uno is Span­ish for one and ichi means one in Japan­ese.) Joan­na left Uno + Ichi in Feb­ru­ary 2018, and Hana began work­ing on it on her own.

“I found that I loved throw­ing pieces on the wheel first and then alter­ing them by hand after­wards. I would throw the near-per­fect form on the wheel, and then play with hit­ting it with a stick, rolling it on the table, or form­ing a shape with my hands,” she explains on her web­site.

“I loved the unpre­dictabil­i­ty of it and the indi­vid­u­al­i­ty each imper­fec­tion brought to the piece. This way of work­ing birthed a new mean­ing of Uno + Ichi for me. Uno + Ichi began to refer to the process and approach I had to mak­ing. Uno began to rep­re­sent the first step in cre­at­ing form on the wheel—sturdy and precise—and ichi came to rep­re­sent the undo­ing of that perfection–unpredictable and flawed.”

Sign up for Hana’s mail­ing list to see when her next batch of ceram­ics will be live in her online shop. For more, fol­low her on Insta­gram.