Welcome to Ayni
About AYNI
AYNI is home to Erica • An evolving creative practice rooted in clay, making, and connection.
The name Ayni comes from an Andean principle of reciprocity: the understanding that life is sustained through giving and receiving, through mutual care and the relationships between people, nature and the world around us.
For me, Ayni is not simply a name. It is a way of approaching making, an ongoing exchange between myself and the materials I work with, between what I create and what creation gives back to me.
It is a practice of paying attention. Of slowing down enough to listen. Of allowing ideas, materials and experiences to take their own shape.
My work moves between ceramics, sculpture, installation, writing, ritual and other forms of creative exploration. Clay remains at its heart: grounding, tactile and endlessly transformative. I am drawn to the way it asks for patience and presence, and to the unexpected ways a material can hold memory, emotion and meaning.
The practice
Ayni initially manifested as a physical shared studio space, a dedicated container created for grounding, slowing down, and reconnecting through the living nature of clay.While that physical chapter was an foundational stepping stone on my journey, Ayni is naturally shifting skins and evolving alongside me. What began within a localized studio setting has blossomed into a much more expansive, unconstrained home for my fine arts practice, independent sculptural projects, writing, and the concepts I am still discovering.
At its core, Ayni is about reciprocity: what we give to the work, and what the work gives back to us.
Meet Erica
Argentine artist, currently based in New Zealand
I’m Erica, an artist, artesana and ceramicist from Buenos Aires, Argentina, now based in Aotearoa New Zealand.
I have been in contact with clay since I was seven years old. Long before I understood it as a profession or a practice, clay was already teaching me about texture, patience, movement and transformation.
My creative path has never followed a straight line. I have always been drawn to colour, pattern, texture and form, but also to the invisible things carried by materials — memory, emotion, energy, atmosphere and meaning.
After making Aotearoa New Zealand home in 2013, I returned deeply to clay through hands-on learning and immersion. In 2022, I completed a four-month internship at Dryburgh's Studio, followed by residencies at Driving Creek Railways and Potteries in 2023 and 2024, and a seven-week residency at Auckland Studio Potters.
Each experience expanded not only my technical understanding, but my relationship with clay as a living material — something that responds, transforms and teaches through the process of making.
Making as a way of becoming
I am interested in the relationship between the tangible and the intangible: between body and material, silence and expression, individuality and belonging.
Nature, dreams, human connection and the rituals of everyday life often find their way into my work.
Ceramics gives me a language for this exploration, but it is not the only one. I move between forms and mediums according to what each idea asks for.
Some works become vessels. Others become sculptural forms, installations, spaces, words or experiences.
I am learning to leave room for that uncertainty — to follow curiosity rather than define the destination too early.
My practice is also deeply connected to the land. I dream of bringing living and making together in a more continuous relationship: working closer to the earth, sourcing clay from the land itself, and creating within a cycle of giving, receiving and renewal.
For now, I continue from where I am, allowing the work to evolve and trusting that each new form will reveal something I could not have arrived at any other way.
This is AYNI: a practice in constant movement, shaped by what I make — and by what making, in turn, makes of me.
