When your mother is as attentive as Rachel Akin’s, you are predestined to shine! She encouraged her by providing art supplies and signing her up for art classes, specifically one at the Nelson Atkins Art Museum when she was six, and at age 11 she attended a summer art camp at the Kansas City Art Institute.
Together they visited antique shops when she was a young girl and Akin was surrounded by her extensive flint glass collection and antique ornament collection and her grandmother’s milk glass plates lining the kitchen wall.
“Many years into working with clay, I realized being surrounded by these vintage pieces had influenced my own creative work,” she smiled.
While attending Shawnee Mission East she was exposed to a technical theater class where she helped with school plays on props, costumes and stage sets. She enjoyed that but enjoyed the ceramics class she took her junior year more.
“I was immediately drawn to working with clay,” she explained.
She persisted and was inspired by her jewelry instructor, who sat down at the potter’s wheel with only one arm as he lost the use of the other due to polio. She purchased her own wheel and practiced at home. She realized her dream of attending KCAI in the fall of 1995.
“I loved my time in the Ceramics Department and spent my sophomore year under the guidance of George Timock. I learned various sculpting techniques like tile making, sculpting our own bust and mold-making,” she continued. “During my junior and senior years, I was fortunate to have Victor Babu as my instructor. He is known for his exquisite porcelain vessels and large intricately decorated platters. I watched him throw a fifty-pound platter once during a studio visit to his house. He noticed my interest in decorating my ceramic vessels and encouraged me to obsess over the surface and put the time into each piece. To this day, I have always emphasized the need for quality not necessarily quantity as I get ready for any show.”
She was the Artist in Residence, Studio Tech and Instructor at the Kansas City Clay Guild for a few years before attending grad school at Ohio University between 2003-06 where she received her MFA.
She then became artist-in-residence at Red Star Studios, now Belger Crane Yard Clay and met her future husband.
“We moved to St. Louis so he could attend medical school. I taught at Craft Alliance for several years while we lived there and also enjoyed a one-year artist residency. I also taught Ceramics classes at Forest Park Community College,” she noted. “I began participating in art fairs and traveled back home for the Plaza and Brookside art fair and Laumeier Art Fair in St. Louis."
They have two daughters, and she shared that lately her older daughter has been into crocheting and her younger daughter loves to draw and sculpt out of clay.
“I'm proud that I have exposed my daughters to a variety of experiences including ice skating, aerial arts, swimming, horseback riding, gymnastics, piano and of course all of the artistic techniques that I have exposed them to over the years,” she exclaimed.
When her husband found a job back home in KC, she was thankful. They now live in Lee’s Summit, and she taught at the KC Clay Guild from 2016 to 2020, and at Art School in downtown Lee’s Summit until it closed in the fall of 2024.
She anticipates being a part of the Brookside Art Fair again this spring.
“I am inspired to create when I see how people respond to my work at art fairs. The positive input from new and repeat customers makes me want to rush back into the studio and get to work!” she smiled.
She creates decorative porcelain pottery, with surfaces accented with stamping and slip trailing. She sees porcelain pots as blank canvases for decoration, and fires in an electric kiln at her home studio.
Her work can be found locally at Belger Crane Yard Clay, the Kemper Museum Gift Shop, West Bottoms Plant Company, Blue Sky Art and Home, and also Charlie Cummings Gallery in Gainesville, FL.
To see her work, visit https://rachel-akin-ceramics.square.site
Follow her – www.instagram.com/rachelakinceramics