Sometime last year, I took my mother out for a pottery session with a local ceramist. It was perhaps one of the most wholesome, calm times we have spent together. A few days ago, I saw someone’s bachelorette party online, where one of the activities was making air-dry clay trinkets. It’s something I’ve been noticing more often - people turning to pottery for different reasons. Some join classes, others collect ceramic pieces to scatter around their home like little moments of whimsy: trays, cups, ashtrays, whatever catches their eye.

The ceramic studio Aura Life in Chandigarh leans entirely into the sheer potential of pottery as a medium. Their designs carry a sense of ease and playfulness, the kind you can recognise immediately in the shapes and glazes. But Aura Life is only one part of a much larger world built by its founders, Anuja and Anya Gupta - a world that has quietly shaped how people think about making, rest, and creativity today. But like most beautiful things, mishaps happen during the process, like one too many vases bursting in the kiln. In collaboration with Duja, a fellow Chandigarh brand that shares their ethos of consciousness and creative play in crafting garments, a collaboration titled 'Phoenix'.

Aura’s Slower Way of Making and Living

For a little background, Aura Life contemporary ceramics take shape with a language that reflects the land around them - calm, earthy, expressive without being loud. Aura Pottery, the brand's retreat vertical, has grown into a space where people come to slow down and work with their hands. It doesn’t follow the structure of a traditional retreat. Instead, it offers something gentler -  time with clay, long walks through orchards, and the calm that comes from settling into a routine without force. Visitors come from everywhere, and somewhere in the process and rhythm of shaping, carving, and glazing, they find a way of being that feels more intentional and less rushed.

Together, Aura Pottery and Aura Life represent a shift in how people want to create and live. Clay becomes a way to think, unwind, and return to the basics. This sensibility, grounded in craft and slowness, is what makes their collaboration with DUJA feel natural.

DUJA and Clothing Built From Fragments

Founded by stylist and creative director Ustat Kharbanda, DUJA works almost entirely with pre- and post-consumer textile waste. The brand collects scraps, leftover pieces, and discarded fabric and reworks them into bold, expressive garments that still carry the stories of their earlier forms. DUJA’s silhouettes are fluid and sculptural, but their foundation is simple: waste has value, and transformation can be both quiet and radical at the same time. This philosophy is what opens the door to Phoenix, a collaboration with Aura Pottery that grew directly out of shared soil and a shared approach to making.

Repurposing Pottery Fragments Into Garments

Phoenix begins with fragments - quite literally. At Aura Pottery, broken ceramic pieces that would usually be discarded were collected and considered as material instead of waste. Inspired in part by Nek Chand’s Rock Garden, where entire worlds were made from discarded objects and broken tiles, DUJA began treating these shards like cloth: arranging, layering, and shaping them around the body.

The result is a sculptural, body-hugging ceramic form that looks like an armour crafted from pieces that have already lived a storied life. It’s wearable in the conceptual sense, but mostly it exists in that space between garment and sculpture - an object you can feel on your skin, but also something that stands on its own.

What makes Phoenix compelling is that nothing about it feels forced. It isn’t a novelty collaboration or something done simply for visual impact. It feels like the natural outcome of two practices that think deeply about material, slowness, and reuse. It also reflects something larger happening across craft and design - a shift toward mindful making, where the value of an object lies not just in how it looks, but in the process and patience behind it. The project acts as a reminder that what is deemed as 'waste' are full of possibility. That beauty doesn’t need to be pristine. That is when two crafts meet - ceramics shaped by earth and garments built from scraps - something entirely new could take form.

In many ways, it mirrors the reason so many people are loving slow hobbies today: the desire to work with one’s hands, to slow down, and to reimagine what can be made from what we already have, from pottery to sewing and everything in between.

Follow Duja India here

Follow Aura Pottery here

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