Hurry Pottery, vessels collection, 2024, ceramic, Barcelona, photo: Marina Oma
Diana Beklemesheva is inspired by the natural patterns visible in the flows of sand and fire.
I am Hurry Pottery. My real name is Diana, but when I entered ceramics, I stepped into another layer of learning myself. I had lived my whole life in a rush – moving fast, thinking fast, always trying to catch up. Clay taught me, and still teaches me, not to. It showed me that life doesn’t have to be that way.
I chose the name Hurry deliberately: short, punchy, familiar to the ear—a reminder not to hurry—and perhaps a quiet nod to my own rushing roots. Pottery became my last name because it became my life. Working with clay became a language I had always needed but never spoke until now.
I was born and raised in Ukraine and moved to Barcelona in 2022. That change was unexpected and unwanted, yet it became the beginning of a new life, the life of Hurry Pottery.
Hurry Pottery, Dune vase, 2024, ceramic, 29x12x12 cm, Barcelona, photo: Alina Dichkova
I came into ceramics searching for a medium that could carry my vision. And my vision has always been drawn to nature, not in a decorative way, but as a way of thinking. Nature is our beginning, our home, and, if we’re wise, our future. It’s where our senses were trained and our consciousness quietly shaped.
Long before we shaped our human world, the big world shaped us: the rhythm of wind carving sand, the pull of firelight, the stillness of water against stone. These forces formed the sensory and emotional architecture of what it means to be human. Even now, our surroundings continue to shape us. The spaces we inhabit, the objects we live with, the images that quietly fill our periphery, they all create the background against which our inner lives unfold.
It may sound deterministic, and in a way it is: I believe in that steady current of influence. But within it, we still have agency. We can shape what shapes us. That, to me, is both a responsibility and a joy. We get to choose what we live among. We get to build our own atmosphere.
This is where my work stands. I want my pieces to spark imagination, to draw people in, to root them in the moment they’re in. To build quiet emotional landscapes that can be inhabited, even briefly. To create forms that make you pause, breathe, and feel something real.
I’ll be honest, always being inspired by nature and observing human life through its prism, the final understanding of my work came through clay. What an irony – I thought I was using it to tell something, and found myself listening to what it was telling me.
Hurry Pottery, Flame vase, 2024, ceramic, 28x40x40 cm, Barcelona, photo: Marina Oma
… the wind working like a patient artist, endlessly drawing and erasing
Some of its tales revealed themselves as forms. “Dune” grew out of my fascination with the way wind shapes sand: no line is ever the same, no pattern repeats. There’s something almost tender in that, the wind working like a patient artist, endlessly drawing and erasing. I wanted to hold one of those gestures still, just for a second, as if the landscape itself had decided to pause. These forms are reminders of how fragile such moments are, how easily they appear and disappear. They’re invitations to celebrate that instant, to contemplate it, to feed the mind and the soul by being fully present. To let that particular flicker of beauty stay with you, even when the wind has moved on.
Hurry Pottery, Dune collection, 2024, ceramic, Barcelona, photo: Marina Oma
Others spoke of energy and belonging. “Flame” reaches back to one of humanity’s oldest companions: fire. Before language, before houses, there was the circle around the fire: light flickering on faces, stories told without words, warmth shared. I wanted to give that moment a body. Its surface traces the dance of flames mid-motion, like a spark caught between breath and memory. It isn’t only about fire itself, but about how it carried us from the first shared warmth to the societies we’ve built.
Hurry Pottery, Flame vessels, 2024, ceramic, 28x40x40 cm, Barcelona, photo: Diana Beklemesheva, Marina Oma
While some tales are about awakening the observer’s thoughts, others are meant to quiet them. “Ikebana” came to me unexpectedly. I built a cliff, a serene lagoon, and the image was so strong that I filled it with the Mediterranean Sea. What appeared wasn’t just a vase, but a place for a quiet ritual. It’s a piece made for hands to take over, for thought to soften. To let the act of arranging become its own kind of pause, one where you let go, shape, and simply be.
Hurry Pottery, Ikebana vase, 2024, ceramic, 12x25x25 cm, Barcelona, photo: Marina Oma
Each piece begins as a quiet observation, but ends as a conversation: between me, the clay, and the world that shaped us. It’s a way of listening back and answering softly, in form.
Hurry Pottery, Dune vase, 2024, ceramic, 23x31x31 cm, Barcelona, photo: Marina Oma
Visit hurrypottery.com and follow @hurrypottery
