Meet the Maker Using Clay and Sculpture to Tell Stories

For nearly three decades, Darcy Miro worked with metal, creating sculptural jewelry and architectural commissions that were explorations of texture and form. But in 2019, after visiting a ceramics studio in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, she found a material that changed everything. “Clay feels so good in your hands, and you don’t need technical skills to make something awesome,” she says. “It is soft and fluid and a kind material versus metal, which is difficult to work with.” 

Raised in Detroit, Miro was introduced to creatives like Keith Haring and Yoko Ono by her mother, who was the art critic for the Detroit Free Press. Later, she studied jewelry design and metalsmithing at the Rhode Island School of Design; her work after graduation quickly drew attention, appearing in contemporary galleries and then the collections of institutions like the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, and the Dallas Museum of Fine Art.

By 2001, she was collaborating on major architectural projects such as the cast-metal façade of the American Folk Art Museum by Tod Williams and Billie Tsien. (That building was ultimately sold to MoMA and demolished; the façade remains in storage at MoMA.) 

Following her transformative trip to the ceramics studio, Miro bought a kiln and began making small objects including “whackadoodle sconces,” which led to a commissioned series for Friedman Benda co-founder Marc Benda’s Shelter Island home. She began to realize her newfound love had legs.

As she experimented, the mother of four linked her new material to themes. “I really started diving into matriarchal storytelling,” she says. “It’s a way to pass down stories traditionally told by the matriarch in the family about history, daily activities, or bonding experiences among women.” Her ceramic mirrors combine recognizable motifs—lips, cherries, fingers, bows—into collaged surfaces. “They became these narratives of my day. So if I’m braiding someone’s hair or if we’re on the street eating a pretzel, it just became this conglomeration of shapes and ideas and stories.” 

Eventually, her work expanded into furniture, including an exuberant clay-covered sofa upholstered in ethically sourced alpaca. For her, the repetition of forms echoes the pace of domestic life—routine, restless, and inventive. “They might look at it three times before they realize it’s a cherry, a pear, a nose, or any of those things that we see regularly,” she says of her iconography.  

Today, Miro continues to move between sculpture, ceramics, and design, often blurring the boundaries between them. She’s in the process of creating sculptures and a metal sofa for a private outdoor commission, as well as ceramic tiles for her home. “All of my work is process-driven,” she says. “It’s all about learning through the journey of making something.”