Miki Palchick is a ceramic artist, gardener, and food educator based in Philadelphia, with roots in the Midwest.  She has been making pottery since childhood and this skill allows her to create vessels for preparing and serving food to people she loves. By growing food and working in clay, Miki strengthens her connection to the ground and celebrates its gifts at a time when people’s relationship to land is constantly challenged. She believes that producing food and making the objects we use in our daily lives are powerful strategies for building healthy sovereign communities.  For Miki, both gardening and ceramics are meditative practices that remind her to slow down, allow her to reintegrate creation into consumption, and inspire her to craft beautiful everyday environments that she hopes can become spaces for collective healing.

While at WSW, Miki made twenty-five bowls per week in variations of four traditional, food-specific vessels: serving, rice, tea, and noodle bowls. A portion of these bowls, thrown in porcelain, were decorated with a screen printed decals in collaboration with her sister Andrienne, a printmaker. Her exhibition in the Gallery Under the Stairs, Hot Pot, was a collaboration between Miki and three Philadelphia-based chefs based on the importance of personal food stories and traditions.