SILCO HAUS has always been drawn to the point where material meets intention — the moment colour stops being decoration and becomes structure. With EDIT: STORIES, we wanted to sit with makers who carry their own relationship to colour and craft, and hear how they got there. This is the first of those conversations.
Thannie's studio, Brunswick © SILCO HAUS
The gốm maker
In a shared studio in Brunswick, Thannie works among ceramic vessels in various states of becoming. Some are bone-dry and ready for the kiln. Others are still soft — their walls barely half a centimetre thick, holding the memory of every touch that built them.
There are no wheels here. No machinery. Just hands, coils of clay, and a patience that borders on devotion.
Thannie calls herself a gốm maker. In Vietnamese, gốm means ceramics — and a gốm maker is simply a worker in that field. Not an artist. Not a title. Just someone who does the work.
It is a distinction she chose deliberately. And like most of her choices, it carries more weight than it first lets on.
Thannie at the workbench © SILCO HAUS
The slowest way to build a wall
Every piece begins the same way. A thin rope of clay, rolled to roughly half a centimetre. Coiled. Pinched. Smoothed. Then another. And another. Fifteen hours, sometimes, without stopping — hands cramping from the repetition, each layer drying just enough under a fan before the next one is laid.
Coiling is one of the oldest techniques in ceramic history. Before the wheel, it was how everything was made — pots, vessels, containers for daily life. The coil marks were visible, even decorative. But when the wheel arrived, so did a new standard: symmetry, smoothness, the absence of any trace of the hand.
Beginning a coil © SILCO HAUS
Thannie spent a year mastering that standard. She learned to hand-build on the wheel — cups, jars, larger vessels — all seamlessly smooth, indistinguishable from thrown work. And then she stopped.
"In today's age where everything is so fast and mass-produced — why am I trying so hard to achieve the perfection that a machine can do? Trying to produce pieces that look the same, that don't look like a person has ever touched them?"
Coiling in progress © SILCO HAUS
She returned to thin coils. Deliberately thin — because the thinner the coil, the more it records. Finger marks. The ambient temperature. Traces of her own glaze work caught in the surface. The environment writes itself into the surface.
It is slow work. It is physically demanding. And it produces objects that could never be mistaken for anything other than what they are: things made by a person, in a specific place, over a specific stretch of time.
Coiling with Noka © SILCO HAUS
The moment she changed the code
Before ceramics, Thannie worked in digital marketing. Before that, she moved — from Vietnam to Singapore to New Zealand to Australia, each country requiring a work visa, each visa requiring a full-time job. When her Australian residency came through, the first thing she did was quit.
She enrolled at a ceramics school. Studied two days a week. Went to the studio another two. Worked the remaining three. She burned through her savings. She did not think about the money.
"I just wanted to make. I didn't care."
Thannie with a coiled vessel © SILCO HAUS
But making, she discovered, was not enough to sustain a life. And the tension between creating and surviving — between the studio and the screen — led her somewhere she had not planned for.
Last year, Thannie won a scholarship to study software engineering — a program that pays women transitioning into tech to attend school full-time, with a salary. She learned Python, TypeScript, Java. She now writes code five days a week and makes ceramics on the remaining two.
The shift sounds radical. In practice, it was strangely intuitive.
"Ceramics is the language of the hands. Coding is just a different language. But the impulse is the same — you're reading, writing, building something from a set of rules and then finding where the rules should bend."
Vessels on the shelf — white, glazed, in progress © SILCO HAUS
The connection between the two surfaced in a specific moment. While building an API — a basic database, first name, last name, age — she noticed every example used Western names. John Doe. Jane Doe. The validation pattern only accepted names that fit a particular shape. Vietnamese names with diacritics, long African names, Korean names that begin with the surname — none of them would pass.
So she changed the code.
"I don't think I would have thought about doing it, had it not been for the fact that I think so much about it just from making art. Your name and how everything connects — being more inclusive of different people in the smallest step of building something."
Thannie in conversation © SILCO HAUS
The name comes first
There is a recurring anxiety among people who hold more than one practice: the suspicion that doing many things means doing none of them well enough. Thannie names it directly.
"I had the worst two, three weeks of imposter syndrome. You're surrounded by artists making art full-time, thinking about glazing every moment of the day. And I'm not doing that. Should I even call myself an artist? Should I even be selling my things?"
Between questions © SILCO HAUS
But the alternative — choosing one title and discarding the rest — feels worse.
"A job title is just one title. It's not you. You have so many different sides."
It was a thought that came up between us during the conversation — and one that stuck.
Tools of the studio © SILCO HAUS
In Vietnamese ceramic tradition, there is no sharp line between artist and artisan. The craft is communal. Everyone participating is a gốm maker — a worker in the field. Thannie chose that framing not to diminish what she does, but to place herself within a lineage that has never required a single definition.
The name comes first. Then everything else follows.
Glaze pigments and recipes © SILCO HAUS
Where red and yellow begin
When Thannie first studied ceramics, the school followed a Japanese-influenced philosophy. Colour, in its commercial form, was effectively forbidden. No stains. No vibrant pigments. The palette was drawn from iron oxide, natural minerals — the muted, earthy spectrum of wabi-sabi. Beauty meant restraint.
She internalised it. And then she left.
Glaze tests — red and yellow © SILCO HAUS
"Leaving the school was the first time I was like — I want to experiment with more colours. I want to see how I can play with it."
Glaze tests, red and yellow © SILCO HAUS
Against that backdrop, her move toward red and yellow feels less like a preference and more like a reclamation.
She is still early in the process. Two glaze tests in the past two weeks — both failed. The base glaze needs changing. The colours in her mind — pulled from short stories she writes, from images that form while reading — never arrive exactly as imagined on the test tile.
"It just feels right. It feels like the next thing I want to do. And if it doesn't come out right, you're just going to keep trying until you can get it right."
Noka among the glaze tests © SILCO HAUS
The light she keeps looking for
Thannie keeps her Noka on a shelf near her work — set to a warm amber that sits just below daylight. It is the light she gravitates toward everywhere.
"In my apartment, there's the extremely bright blue light that you can't escape. So I keep everything dim. My sister always says she can't see anything in my bathroom."
Noka on the shelf, warm amber © SILCO HAUS
Among the coils and glaze tests, it does what she needs it to: softens edges without erasing detail. A quiet presence in a space built around the slow accumulation of material and colour — catching the surface of wet clay and reflecting it back warmer.
Noka in red © SILCO HAUS
One touch, and the studio shifts — from workbench to something quieter. A red glow spills across the clay, the turntable, the tools still wet from the last round of coiling. Fifteen hours of making, and now the space doesn’t feel like a workspace anymore. It feels like the pause between one language and the next.
Two days
The studio will be quieter on Monday. Thannie will be at her desk writing Java, thinking in a different language. But the pieces she built on weekends — fifteen hours of coiling, pinching, smoothing — will be in the kiln by then, recording the heat the way they recorded her hands.
Two days a week. It keeps her alive.
The studio after hours © SILCO HAUS
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Thannie is a ceramicist and software engineer based in Melbourne. Find her work at @gom_maker on Instagram.
What does she listen to while the coils dry? Stay tuned to check out her studio playlist on @studio.silco.
