How the Pottery Studio Came to Be

The best things at Aavya were never planned. They just arrived — in a conversation, in a quiet moment, in someone looking around and saying something out loud that couldn't be unsaid.

A Moon Sculpture and a Sentence

The pottery studio was exactly like that. We were working on a moon sculpture one evening. The artist was carefully painting, the light was doing that golden Tapovan thing it does just before it disappears, and we had just been given access to a beautiful new terrace — open, airy, overlooking the forests and the mountains.

In the middle of all of it, the sculptor looked around and said, almost casually: "This would be the perfect place for a pottery studio."

That was it. One sentence. But it landed like it had been waiting to be said.

The Rishikesh Pottery Studio Chapter

The space ran for about a year as the Rishikesh Pottery Studio — many people in Rishikesh will know the name, it became genuinely popular. That chapter was real and it mattered. Rishikesh Pottery Studio has since moved down the road and is doing his own thing, and we share a warm bond that's carried over from that time. Some things end well. That one did.

Building It the Aavya Way

When the studio became fully ours to run, we didn't want to just maintain what was there. We wanted to build on it — slowly, honestly, in the Aavya way.

The person who makes that possible, more than anyone, is Kumar Krishna. He's been an artist his whole life — over a decade of working with clay, with form, with the kind of quiet attention that can't be taught in a short course. He's the senior presence in the studio, the one who holds the knowledge, and also somehow the one who makes beginners feel least intimidated by it.

Alongside him, Shivani, Aarti and Shalini bring their own colour — literally. Aarti and Shalini are painters and artists in their own right, and you can feel that in the studio. There's sketching happening alongside wheel work. Paintings drying near sculptures. Colours appearing on walls.

A Space That's Never Finished

Every week the space looks a little different from the week before — a little more itself. That's the thing nobody quite tells you about creative spaces. They're never finished. They're not supposed to be. The Aavya Pottery & Arts Studio is still becoming what it's going to be — and honestly, that's the most exciting part of it.

Come on a Tuesday and it'll look one way. Come back in a month and something will have shifted — a new piece on the wall, a different energy in the room, someone in the corner trying something none of us have tried before.

Every day it gets a little more colourful. We're not rushing that.

Aavya Pottery & Arts Studio, Upper Tapovan, Rishikesh. Sessions open to everyone — beginners, artists, and the genuinely curious. Find us on WhatsApp or just walk up to the terrace.