Rachel Heibel: Habits
Rachel Heibel presents a collection of works that bubble and sprout and grow; sensuous, feminine and organic, Heibel animates her pieces, transforming clay into creatures from unknown ecosystems. Her whimsical experimentation with material, form and function push her works beyond simply ceramic sculpture. Habits is Heibel’s first SF solo presentation.
Rachel Heibel is a sculptor and ceramic artist based in San Francisco. Her work moves between sculpture and functional objects, using clay to think through the body, repetition, ritual, time, and the ways we make meaning through use.
Working primarily by hand, Heibel is interested in the intelligence of materials and the accumulation of gestures that happens through making. Her practice draws from craft traditions, everyday rituals, and the physical experience of living in a body; treating function not as separate from sculpture, but as another way of activating it.
She received her MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2024 and her BFA from the University of Michigan in 2022.
From Rachel's substack:
I’ve completed a few bodies of work now and I’m able to chart this spiral that happens during the weeks leading up to installing a show where I can’t find words for all of the work sitting in front of me. The pieces must have satisfied some criteria that exists within, because they’re left standing there rather than being smashed into shards. I think the structure of things led me to believe I have to justify the work with a punchy concept tied up in a bow. I made myself an epsom salt bath and rewatched one of the most comforting clips on the internet where Ruth Duckworth described her process of working by saying “If it makes me smile I think oooo, it doesn’t always do that.”
When looking at the work, valid initial readings might be references to smoke plumes, water droplets, patterns from nature, motherly bellies, silly figures with personalities, and work about material exploration. Habits may not be what the objects visually depict; it’s in the repetition, accumulation, and rituals that brought them into being. Each piece is its own little story, but it works as the title because of my evolving process of working and the ceramic world’s ancient tie to domestic life. Not that I don’t think a beautifully made coffee mug can’t be shown in a gallery; rather, the habits I find myself lingering on are more like the pattern I can’t stop repeating every time I hold a pencil, a candle I light to mark time that’s special and set aside, or the process of coil building where I stack 2-4 rows of coils and blend down on the outside then up on the inside and then repeat. I’m interested in what happens when a small gesture is repeated enough times that it becomes something larger than itself.
These habits are a form of secular sacred practice. Thinking about my upbringing in weekly Catholic mass made me appreciate the structure and familiarity that came with the pattern of the service and the layout of a Church. I think ceramic studios are like churches in a way; clay has an alchemic process of becoming ceramic and the layout of any studio supports this. The same actions happen over and over, by different people, across different days; and the cycles repeat for generations.
The work is about clay and the history of ceramic vessels of all forms- and about how this practice of collaborating with such a specific material has been a part of my life for ten years now and if all things go my way, forever. Clay complicates my understanding of time. It’s a geological material that existed long before I touched it, but it can also contain incredibly recent histories. Much of the clay I work with now is reclaimed from the community studio where I work, and I make grog from shards of my own older work. An object becomes a shard, a shard becomes a clay body, and the clay becomes another object. The work is never really starting from zero; It starts with material and vessel.
I’ve walked around the park two blocks from my apartment in a T-shirt in December and noticed the dazzling plants and the golden-hour colors that don’t compare to anywhere else I’ve lived. Obviously this is in the work. The seasons here move differently for me, and I’ve started paying closer attention to more minute cycles of things growing and changing. The coiled forms are connected to my fascination with how plants grow and unfold. A plant doesn’t arrive at its final form in one gesture; it unfolds through repeated increments, responding to its environment as it goes. I think there’s something similar in the way I build with clay, where a form materializes after repeated coils or gestures of attaching and smoothing.
I’ve taken time to think about what my studio practice will look like long term and how I can support it by maintaining my health, mentally and physically. I’ve been forming healthy habits and breaking bad ones. I think that’s probably part of why I keep coming back to this word. Habits are small things, almost insignificant on their own but over time they become the structure of a life, or a sculpture. My family used to joke that every road trip has a breaking point and making sculpture is kind of like that. Theres always a moment when making each piece where I’m tempted to flip the proverbial monopoly board, or smoosh it back into mud, but a favorite mentor of mine urged me to “see it through” enough times which taught me that repetition has its own kind of intelligence. When I continue working, a form eventually emerges that I couldn’t have planned from the beginning.
As one ceramicist in a 20k year lineage of people working with this material it’s easy to notice our lives as finite and linear, but participating in cycles that vastly exceed an individual lifetime. Clay, plants, animals, water, fire, weather, and the human body all operate on different scales of time and we’re constantly interacting with larger and smaller cycles. It’s been helpful to identify these cycles to realize the good wouldn’t exist without the bad and to revel in the moments where the work makes me smile because after all, it will likely out live me.