Lifestyle
Inspired by her dog, this L.A. ceramist makes beloved pets 'eternal'
Ceramic characters, each with their own whimsical charm, gaze from various angles in Rami Kim’s studio. Built by hand, their faces emerge from planters, ceramic dishes and slip-cast mugs like the cast of an animated Hayao Miyazaki movie. On a shelf, a customized dog figurine — a client’s beloved terrier — lies on its stomach atop a lilac-colored butter dish. Nearby, a retriever, in a seated position, rests on a woman’s head.
“I like the idea of giving life to the objects I create,” Kim said, standing in her garage studio. “They’re my imaginary friends.”
In this series, we highlight independent makers and artists, from glassblowers to fiber artists, who are creating original products in Los Angeles.
Some of her sculptures have names, each a tribute to the inspiration behind them. There’s the Penelope table lamp, where a mysterious, almost melancholy face base is adorned with a glass globe. And there’s Gus, Kim’s beloved white Maltese, who was her constant companion for 17 years until his death in 2023.
“I spent my 20s, 30s and part of my 40s with Gus,” she said softly before adding, “I miss him.”
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Kim was sculpting a life-size Gus lamp at her work table the other day when a smile suddenly illuminated her face. With each detail of his fluffy coat, she seemed to be acknowledging the dog who brought her so much joy, infusing the lamp with the same warmth and happiness as her constant companion.
“People like to have something functional that they can use every day,” Kim said of her character-driven works.
“Gus was my family,” said the 43-year-old artist as she painted the dog’s eyes and nose. “He was a sweet boy with a gentle personality. During the pandemic, it was so helpful to have him near me when life was so uncertain.”
Born and raised in Seoul, Kim studied character animation at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts). After earning a master of fine arts from the UCLA Animation Workshop, she secured a job as a background painter for Nickelodeon’s “Dora the Explorer” and the independent animation company July Films, where she worked on her former CalArts professor Mike Nguyen’s 2D-animated feature film “My Little World.”
Gus accompanied her.
“I want to make work that people can touch and hold,” said Kim, a former animator.
Kim smiled, remembering how her colleagues embraced Gus. “I would bring him to work with me every day,” she recalled. “Everybody liked to greet him and was so happy to see him. He would sit under my desk on his dog bed while I worked at the computer.”
Kim was still working in animation when she first tried ceramics at Ball Clay Studio in Highland Park, which is now closed. “I started making these little figurines as a product for stop-motion animation,” she said, holding two floating faces. The transition from the digital world to the tactile process of ceramics was a turning point in her artistic journey.
A selection of works inside Kim’s ceramics studio near La Crescenta.
“I still remember when I first touched the clay,” Kim said. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God. I need to keep doing this.’ I loved working with my hands. The possibilities seemed endless. I just knew that I would be doing ceramics for the rest of my life, as I would never get bored with it. And I get bored easily.”
It grew from there.
Coming from an animation background, where she learned the art of bringing characters to life, Kim said she “always wanted to create characters in a different form. That’s how I give life to my ceramic creations.”
Adding faces to her vessels made Kim feel like the pieces “now have a life.”
She started to turn her organic vessels into faces, complete with eyes and lips. “That made me feel like they had a character,” she said. “The sculptures now have a life.”
When she grew weary of sitting at a computer all day long doing animation, Kim decided to pursue ceramics full time, working out of a studio in Atwater Village and later a garage studio next to her rental home near La Crescenta.
Nguyen, her former CalArts professor, isn’t surprised to hear she has an emotional attachment to the characters she creates.
“We as humans are very much interested in each others essences, thoughts and feelings,” he said in an email. “Character-driven work is one focus aspect of the overall experiences of being alive. It is not necessarily coming directly from her work as an animator, but from the people she has met, the friends in her life and her family.”
A ceramic home depicts Kim and her dog, Gus.
With people worried about a possible recession, Kim has seen customers hesitate to spend money on her works, which cost between $50 for a mug to $1,800 for a customized lamp. So she started creating custom animal figurines for clients, many of whom, like her, have lost their pets. “People share their stories about the past,” she said of the process. “They share photos of their pet and tell me their favorite poses, which helps me sculpt them. I feel like I know the pets. It’s very special.”
Eileen O’Dea — who commissioned Kim to design a figurine of her late dog, Owen, a mixed pup she found on the street near her West L.A. woodshop — talked about the profound emotional resonance of Kim’s work. “It’s the kind of object that blurs the line between beauty and memory,” O’Dea said of the butter dish Kim made her. “It looks just like him; even his floppy ear is perfect. Every time I use it, I’m reminded of him.”
Another customer ordered two custom figurines as a gift for her sister who had just completed nursing school at the age of 60. “Her dogs had helped her get through it,” Kim said. “It was such a touching story to be a part of.”
“Hopefully Gus is running around with other dogs having a good time,” Kim said of her late dog, Gus.
The tactile nature of her work is something she hopes to share with others. “I want to create work that people can enjoy and touch and hold,” she said, adding, “I hope my work gives people a warm feeling.”
Yes, it’s hard working for yourself, she said, but Kim likes the flexibility of being able to work anytime she wants or take a day off to wander a museum or see a movie. However, after she relocated her studio from Atwater Village, where she shared space with other artists, to her home in La Crescenta, she admitted to feeling isolated.
“I miss having a community and visiting with studio mates. I feel like I learn so much from other people. That’s why I host workshops here in my studio,” said Kim, who enjoys teaching. “As an independent artist working alone, it’s tough because I don’t want to work too much in the wholesale business because then I would need a team and more orders, and then I would have to operate like a factory.”
“It makes me happy when people share stories about their pets with me,” Kim said.
Kim’s ability to capture the unique personality of each pet in her ceramics provides solace to clients who have lost their pets. (Rami Kim )
Still, she can’t see herself going back to computer work. “I’ll never get bored with this,” she said. “I can do this until I’m 90. I’m having so much fun.”
Kim’s understanding of the comfort her ceramics provide to those grieving the loss of a pet is not just professional but deeply personal. She has experienced it herself in her studio, home and garden, where she is surrounded by the “friends” that she has created.
“When I put the Gus lamp on a table in my living room, it feels like he is sitting next to me,” she said. “He’s eternal now.”
I regret to inform you I’ll need to keep this introduction brief. Not because there’s any lack of things to say about July’s crop of notable new releases; it features award-winning journalists and several different flavors of anxiety about our bleak ecological future and data-dominated present, as well as the welcome returns of several beloved novelists.
No, these books certainly deserve some love, dear readers. It’s just that I’m finding it a bit tough to type while bearhugging a box fan. And since it seems that may be my last best chance to get through this latest U.S. heat wave here on the east coast without sweating through my shirt, I feel some urgency to get back at it.
So enough with the ado. With any luck, you’ll soon be cracking open one of these great reads on the beach — or in front of a decent air-conditioning unit, at any rate.
You Won’t Get Free of It: Stories of Mothers and Daughters, by Rachel Aviv (July 7)
Aviv, New Yorker staff writer and finalist for this year’s Pulitzer Prize, has a fairly extensive purview in her role as reporter at large. Still, when reviewing her latest work, Aviv noticed a crucial throughline: “I realized that, to some degree, I’d been writing about mother-daughter pairs for the last decade,” she explained to the Paris Review. Seeing this, she decided to collect and revise half a dozen of those stories, which cover ground from a daughter’s troubling fugue states to the immigrant nannies who must leave their own children behind, to Alice Munro’s daughter, whose claims of sexual abuse went unheeded yet regularly resurfaced in her mother’s fiction.
Country People, by Daniel Mason (July 7)
In Mason’s first novel since North Woods, 2023’s critical darling and book club stalwart, readers are plopped right back in the New England woods but the time scale has shrunk considerably. Whereas North Woods spanned centuries, his new novel confines itself to a single year, during which Miles, loving family man and lackadaisical Ph.D. candidate, plans to finally buckle down on that derelict degree of his and reassert his worth to one and all! At least, that’s the idea. But plans don’t stand much of a chance when there are eccentric neighbors to befriend and mysterious local legends to investigate.
Catch the Devil: A True Story of Murder, Deception, and Injustice on the Gulf Coast, by Pamela Colloff (July 14)
This is the first book from Colloff, a veteran investigative journalist for ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine. She has won multiple National Magazine Awards for stories focused on miscarriages of justice – such as her 2019 piece about Paul Skalnik, a grifter, fabulist, sexual predator and snitch, whose fabrications can be linked to dozens of wrongful convictions in Florida, including some sending the innocent to death row. Here Colloff expands upon that investigation, which gets a lot more room to breathe in the transition from magazine article to full-length book. What emerges in this disturbing account is a portrait of one man’s callous cruelty, and the law enforcers who had no problem tolerating a deal with the devil, provided it kept juicing the conviction rate.
Cloudthief, by Nathaniel Rich (July 14)
Though it’s his fiction we’re discussing here, it’s important to note Rich’s reporting has earned plaudits, too, as well as a few film adaptations. No matter the medium, climate change is usually on his mind, as well as the blunt, rather bleak, prognosis he offered on Fresh Air in 2019: “There’s a huge range of outcomes … ranging from the not very good to the apocalyptic.” Which is to say I’m surprised to find myself describing his newest response to global catastrophe as a rollicking good time – and not just because I’ve never said those words, in that order, in my life. This spry, funny caper features a freelance environmental reporter who inadvertently breaks bad, careening under the influence of lust and a light wallet toward the novel’s big centerpiece: the planned heist of a massive data center.
Data Empire: The Power of Information to Organize, Control, and Dominate, by Roopika Risam (July 14)
And now, for another book centered on data – albeit from a rather different angle. This illuminating history from Risam, a Dartmouth professor, traces the practice of collecting information – and the power conferred by possessing it – from the bones that were humans’ first archives, to the omnipresent systems that shape (or outright determine) life today. As Risam asks, “What has it meant – and what will it mean – when records that once served only to help us remember, come to rule?” A pressing question (see: those data centers), which you’re probably better served trying to answer with the help of Risam than, say, Alexa or Claude.
It Will Come Back to You: Stories, by Sigrid Nuñez (July 14)
For someone with nine novels to her name, Nuñez got a later start than you might expect, having published her first book when she was already in her mid-40s. More than three decades later, now a spry 75 years old, the National Book Award winner has gotten around to publishing her first collection of short stories. The 13 stories here have been culled from across her career, but each one resonates clearly with the warm timbre of her voice: simple, unadorned prose and mundane setups, from which she consistently manages to tease out glimpses of truth, elusive and profound.
They Stole a City: Wilmington’s White Supremacist Coup and the Families Who Live with Its Legacy, by Lauren Collins (July 14)
The only coup d’etat to succeed on U.S. soil is, at most, a distant historical afterthought these days. To be honest, I can’t recall reading a single textbook entry that even remarked on the 1898 race massacre in Wilmington, N.C., an action led by white supremacists that left many (historian estimates say up to 300) Black Wilmingtonians dead and permanently scarred a community newly aware of its simmering animus and vulnerability to violent overthrow. So I’m grateful for Collins’ new chronicle of the infamous event, which fills in some serious gaps in the American collective memory and explains how its perpetrators cultivated the disorienting silence that persists in the historical record today.
Yellow Pine, by Claire Vaye Watkins (July 21)
I don’t think I’ve ever actually laid eyes on the Mojave Desert but after reading Watkins’ latest novel, it feels like I can picture it more vividly than some streets I’ve actually lived on. No, it’s “not a beginner’s wilderness,” as Watkins concedes in Yellow Pine, but this landscape so redolent of death is also deceptively robust with life, if only you’re patient enough to find it. Too bad, then, that it’s also on fire. And choked by drought, irradiated by military test sites and soon to be sacrificed to a massive new solar array named, inexplicably, Yellow Pine. But those aren’t the only complications confronting the book’s main character, Rose, whose aspirations of becoming a kind of climate hermit warp a bit under the pressure of a rekindled love and the pendulum swing of rage and despair at the state of the world.
Cool Machine, by Colson Whitehead (July 21)
Ray Carney is back, for what regrettably appears to be the last time. The lifelong Harlemite, hard-luck furniture dealer and ambivalent crook starred previously in Harlem Shuffle and its sequel, Crook Manifesto. His perspective is our window on the changing eras of the historically Black neighborhood, from the mid-1950s on. In this, the final installment in Whitehead’s brisk, exceedingly entertaining Harlem Trilogy, readers catch up with Carney around the start of the 1980s, following him deeply into Reagan’s decade. The novel also represents the end of an era for Whitehead, whose attention has been exclusively occupied with these characters since he won Pulitzer Prizes for consecutive novels, The Underground Railroad and Nickel Boys.
Beginning Middle End, by Valeria Luiselli (July 28)
The gifted young Mexican writer returns this month with her fourth novel, the second she has written in English and her first since Lost Children Archive launched to widespread plaudits more than seven years ago. Her new book, like her previous one, also concerns the travels of a small family – only this time, the road leads not through the American Southwest but Sicily. And the history sought by its mother-daughter main characters is not a record of bureaucratic cruelty but something much more intimately personal: the links shaped and tested by generations of shared heritage and experience.
Karen McNenny is a certified divorce coach, certified co-parenting specialist and author of the book The Good Divorce: How to End Your Marriage Without Ending Your Family.
Wiley/Jossey-Bass/NPR, Nicole Wickens/NPR
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When Karen McNenny was facing divorce about 15 years ago, she was afraid of what it would mean for her future: despair, debt and a lifetime of resentment, she says.
At the same time, she was thinking of her two children, she says. She didn’t want their father to become her enemy.
So she and her former husband chose to approach divorce differently as a couple. “We’re going to renovate and transform this family. We’re not going to destroy it,” she says. “The marriage is ending, not your relationship.”
For McNenny, a mediator, certified divorce coach and certified co-parenting specialist, divorce is a tool, not a weapon. She expands on this concept in The Good Divorce: How to End Your Marriage Without Ending Your Family, which came out this spring. The book offers guidance on how to maintain compassionate and respectful ties with a former spouse while also healing and moving forward.
According to Pew Research Center, a third of Americans who have ever been married had a first marriage that ended in divorce. For that reason, McNenny hopes her book becomes a must-read for couples before they get married. “The best time to talk about divorce is before you need to talk about it,” she says.
She shared insights from her book in a conversation with Life Kit. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
The book is called The Good Divorce. What does that mean?
[For those with kids,] the good divorce is about protecting the future of the family while we dissolve the marriage.
After the paperwork is done and the assets have been divided, can you and your co-parent sit on the same side of the bleachers during the basketball game? Can you still see yourselves as a partnership, with the ability to have thoughtful conversations about your kids?
For those who don’t have kids, [the good divorce is] about protecting your health — your mental health and your physical health. If we are doubling down with resentment and bitterness, all of that gets stored in the body and shows up in different ways. You deserve a pathway that’s less destructive.
Let me also be clear: There are times when an amicable, collaborative process is not possible and maybe even inappropriate. For instance, where there’s active addiction, abuse, domestic violence, coercion or unmanaged mental health issues.
How do you get to a place where you don’t feel triggered by your partner, so you both can work together toward a good divorce?
That, my dear, does not happen overnight. That is more like a dimmer switch going up and down and up and down, and the gift of time helps to get there.
It’s a complex emotional journey because we do feel relief in walking away from our spouse and the challenges. But with it, there is extraordinary grief that comes with divorce that I think is often underestimated and undersupported.
If my spouse had died, people would’ve been checking in with me regularly. I never would’ve spent a holiday alone in that first year. There probably would’ve been a meal train.
But he didn’t die. My marriage died, my family structure died, my identity as a wife and a partner died. There’s so much grief through these transformations that come with divorce that we don’t see.
So supporting friends in all those ways that you would as if there had been an actual death is doing a lot for your friends who are going through divorce.
How do you let your friends, family and community know that you’re getting a divorce and that you might need support?
Put a communication strategy together. It’s not just for how we tell the kids. It’s also a communication strategy for the grandparents; to the circle of support around the kids, like teachers, coaches and mentors; and our shared community.
It’s extraordinary when a couple can write that message together, not unlike a marriage announcement. [You might say:] We’ve made a really difficult decision. We wanted to let you know. We’re not going to court. Don’t expect a battle. Please don’t ask us why. Just ask us how we’re doing. We’re on the same side as the kids. You don’t need to pick sides.
In doing so, we’ve given everyone the same information at once. It’s a unified message that comes from the parent team, and it allows your community to know how best to support you. And it takes out all the gossip and wonder about what is going on.
If you have kids and they’re splitting time between two homes, what are some ways to make that change easier for them?
Our kids were 5 and 7 when we divorced, so it was three or four nights at a time in each home. By the time they got to be about 8 or 10, it made sense to go a week in each residence. After COVID, the kids came to us and said, “Can we just have two weeks in a house? We wanna be able to settle in more.” [So we said] OK.
A lot of parents are so rigid about the schedule. There’s no flexibility. That doesn’t serve anyone. So I recommend liberating yourselves from the calendar and letting it grow and bend with your kids appropriately.
Knowing what you know now about divorce, what questions do you think couples should ask themselves before they get married?
So often when people arrive at the threshold of divorce, couples are like, “We don’t know what we’re doing.” Get educated about the business part of it.
There is no harm in having a prenuptial agreement. Even if you decided not to file it, have the conversation about the implications. What does it mean if we buy this house together? What does it mean if one of us works more and one of us works less?
We also underestimate what it means to be roommates. What are your value systems around cooking and cleaning? How much alone time do you need? It’s easy to fall in love and not know if you’re compatible.
Do you think you’d get married again?
I absolutely hope that I get to say yes to a lifelong commitment with a partner, as I believe we often are given the opportunity to become a better version of ourself through partnership.
The story was edited by Meghan Keane. The visual editor is CJ Riculan. We’d love to hear from you. Leave us a voicemail at 202-216-9823, or email us at LifeKit@npr.org.
Listen to Life Kit on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and sign up for our newsletter. Follow us on Instagram: @nprlifekit.
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