Press
For a more homespun option, the artist Michele Mirisola of Chell Fish releases delightfully illustrated platters in limited batches every month, made from epoxy clay and real oyster shells covered in a food-safe resin (she accepts D.M.s for custom orders for any designs that are sold out at her web shop).
March 3, 2023
How did you start your creative tableware line, Chell Fish?
I made my first shell plate because I needed the perfect way to hold raspberries. I was working on a still life painting of fruit and sugar cookies. Up until that point, I had been exclusively painting from life. I wanted a hand in building the things I was making paintings of. During the lockdown, I couldn’t travel to my studio by train, so I was reimagining my materials–from oil paint to gouache. I used an air drying clay and still do, so I never need a kiln. The plate was more interesting to me than the painting it was created for! I added a food safe resin on top so that it could be used over and over again, and it took off from there.
Michele Mirisola (she/her, artist, writer, birth doula, and creator of Chell Fish): When I couldn’t travel to Bedstuy to get to my studio during NYC’s lockdown, I needed an art practice at home. I created Chell Fish from piles of shells I had held onto, convinced I would one day use them (and I have never been more vindicated). It has been such a pleasure to have my work in Café Forgot and with Your Other Left Ear… Hot tip: you can replace salt with anchovies on almost anything and live a fuller life.
Michele Mirisola, 31, an artist in Brooklyn who owns a set of gilded Homer Laughlin plates, agrees that “if you’re not partying as much in restaurants and bars” fine china is “a way to class up what you’re doing at home.”
Inspired by the colors of Delftware, a style of Dutch tin-glazed pottery, Ms. Mirisola has made a collection of patterned clay tableware in a blue-and-white palette for her line Chell Fish.—Hilary Reid