Bella Tylen has found her creative home in ceramics, creating pieces that take on a whimsical, otherworldly quality.
Drawing inspiration from vintage styles, ancient Greek pottery and her own love for eccentric, tactile art, Tylen creates ceramics that are as unpredictable as they are captivating.
Tylen was first introduced to ceramics while attending Denton High School, where she says there was a great art program and teachers.
“I just fell in love with it my junior year,” Tylen says. “And my senior year, I spent the entire year making fairy gardens, so my work has an aspect of fantasy to it.”
Ceramics is expensive, Tylen says, and she was unable to find a studio for a long time. She moved to Oak Cliff and got a membership at Pottery for the People, where she dove back in to her craft.
“Now I’m in a space where I have a little outdoor studio, and I can just work all the time,” Tylen says. “I want my art to be kind of wonky and eccentric. I’ve fallen in love with the handbuilding concept, because it kind of makes its own shape and evolves into its own form.”
Photography by Dorian Marsh
Photography by Dorian Marsh
Photography by Dorian Marsh
Photography by Dorian Marsh
Photography by Dorian Marsh
Handbuilding is a ceramics technique that allows you to create forms with clay and your hands, without using a throwing wheel.
“It gives me a little more control over my designs,” Tylen says. “I really love corsets and ribbons and frills and lace. I love birds. Lots of spirals. I try to keep things really eclectic.”
While taking a break from ceramics after high school, Tylen says she tried “just about everything” from woodworking to painting. She came back to ceramics because she found she was always more of a tactile builder.
“I love ceramics because it’s 3D so it’s like, I don’t have to do the job of creating the shadows and the highlights like you do with painting,” Tylen says. “I’m not good at that. But with ceramics, I don’t have to do that. I just make a form, and the light does all of that.”
Tylen also curates vintage and takes that style into consideration when creating ceramics.
“I’m obsessed with everything old,” she says. “I do try to add this age element. I’m really inspired by old Greek ceramics and kind of like the figurines that they put on them, and they just have this otherworldly, Old World essence. So I tried to kind of incorporate that in my work.”
When she makes a piece, Tylen likes to imagine a story as to where it might belong if it were from Ancient Greece.
“I want people to kind of come up with those stories themselves,” Tylen says.
As far as creating her pieces, Tylen says sometimes she knows exactly what she is going to do, and other times, it doesn’t turn out how she anticipates.
“Especially when you’re handbuilding, clay is so finicky. So if it’s too wet, let’s say you pinch in a coil that’s pretty wet, it’s gonna be more flimsy. So it might like flow up this way and make like a weird bend, and so it changes the shape,” she says. “There’s a lot of factors that influence how things turn out.”
Tylen says she wants her work to be “odd and satisfying,” and one of her most popular pieces is a bottle she made in a random flow state.
Outside of her ceramics, Tylen models full time. She says the traveling she does to Los Angeles and New York for her job inspires her art.
Most of her engagement and sales come from Instagram, but she has had products in local stores such as Tlazo Home.
“I’ve been really shocked with just the community that it has built,” Tylen says. “Because I feel like sometimes you get the following, like the community feeling, or that engagement, they just follow along and are really engaged. I’ve built a community of artists.”
