LOS ANGELES -- Chelsea Bayouth remembers returning to her Altadena home on Jan. 11, 2025. "No, no, no, no, no," she remembers saying.

Flames still burned from the Eaton fire, which forced her to evacuate a few nights earlier with her husband, 3-year-old daughter and 19-year-old neighbor.

Nothing remained except for pieces of her porcelain ceramics.

"It was like going to the morgue to identify a body," said Bayouth, 40. "It was the worst day."

Her home and the accessory dwelling unit, or ADU, that housed her art studio, containing fabrication supplies, paintings and a floor-to-ceiling bookshelf of sketchbooks and journals she'd kept since childhood, were now "mountains of floaty ash," Bayouth said.

She remembers scooping up what remained of her artwork and watching it sift through her fingers, the porcelain broken and changed.

"They had pieces of my studio fused to them. Iron, glass. … Literally anything around it that melted and could not turn to ash got stuck to them," Bayouth said.

She had only started working with high-fire porcelain five months before the fire. She didn't realize, at the time, that porcelain, which is fired at well over 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit in the kiln, is nearly indestructible to heat.

It's been a year-and-a-half since the fire devastated Altadena, and today, Bayouth's art is "very catalyzed" by what happened. Much of her work centers on grief: the grief of motherhood, existing or a home destroyed, Bayouth said.

Bayouth and her family now live in Silver Lake. Professionally, she works as a freelance puppet builder supporting film and television. She's worked on projects ranging from "Robot Chicken" stop-motion productions — for which she won an Emmy in 2016 — to Olivia Rodrigo's recent music video, "the cure." She is also a poet with work featured in various online literary magazines and she has a manuscript she's trying to publish.

Bayouth continues to make sculptures out of her in-home studio, and she sells them online and at art markets through her brand, Sea Bay Ceramics. Prices range from $45 to $400, depending on size and how much 18-karat gold is used for the piece.

In her studio, surrounded by shelves of porcelain figures she recovered from Altadena and refired, she fashions whimsical sculptures imitating feminine figures and feline forms. "Which are the same," she said, laughing. "Those two energies are very similar."

Most are small enough to fit into the palm of her hand.

On some pieces, she writes lines of poetry. On others, handwritten spells manifesting joy or health dance across the white surface.

Art became a spiritual practice for Bayouth in her 20s, when she experienced "a massive existential crisis" that left her paralyzed by the "big" questions: "What's beyond our world? What's the point of everything? Why are we living here? What's governing?"

"I couldn't eat. I was the thinnest I'd ever been. I was just so anxious every day, not having answers to these questions," Bayouth said. "I didn't understand how anybody could be going about their lives, just driving and making plans."

Art became her way of processing those anxieties. She crafted large, ethereal paintings of nude figures floating through space who chanted phrases confronting the universe's greatest mysteries.

"To exist is beyond rationality," Bayouth recalled one saying. "We are made from humming triangles," she remembered of another. Those paintings burned in the Eaton fire.

When she recovered her porcelain figures from her Altadena home, with bits of her studio forever glued to their surface, she wondered what would happen if she refired them. She knew they would melt and change form, and she wanted to see how.

"Do you see how it's got all of these runs in it?" Bayouth said from her Silver Lake studio, turning over a horned cat figure smaller than a strawberry. "This is iron that was in my studio that, after I fired it, melted and vitrified and became part of the piece."

Some pieces in Bayouth's studio have faint, yellow colorations to them that weren't there before, she said. She reapplied their gold luster, which burned off in the fire. That "should give you a clue as to how hot the fire was," she said.

The resulting effect stirred Bayouth to use more outside elements in her glaze application. One humanesque figure in her studio, with tears glistening below its peacefully closed eyelids, has iron-rich sand from Big Sur fused to the surface, making it look like it was "unearthed in a river or taken out of a house fire," Bayouth said.

She collects material from other places, too, like dirt from her daughter's preschool yard or sand from local beaches — anything elemental that "will really alchemize and change form in the kiln."

Bayouth's love for ceramics goes back to childhood. Growing up in Woodland Hills, she comes from a family of Angeleno artists. Her father, a classically trained oil painter, kept a potter's wheel in the garage, throwing pots as a hobby. Her mother went to school for art — as did Bayouth, a 2008 graduate of California Institute of the Arts. And her brother is also a puppet builder. The siblings collaborate on walk-around suits and puppets large and small.

Despite taking ceramics classes as a kid and loving it, Bayouth didn't return to the art form until many years later, when two life-altering events rattled her sense of self: the COVID-19 pandemic and, within it, the birth of her daughter.

When the pandemic hit, Bayouth found herself hooked on mudlarking YouTube videos, a practice in which people hunt for treasures on beaches, lakes and — in Bayouth's case — England's River Thames. Scavengers would dig up artifacts like gold coins and porcelain doll heads, and Bayouth admired their aged, archival qualities, a theme that takes shape in her ceramics.

"There's just an energy to things with a history," Bayouth said.

Then, in 2021, Bayouth became a mother — an experience that "irrevocably changed" her.

When her daughter, Valentine, was born, "it was a double whammy of like, who are you and what are you offering this world?" Bayouth said. "It was a real annihilation of self."

As a new mother, Bayouth struggled to find a way back to art. That changed when she rediscovered ceramics. She found she could make sculptures relatively quickly, in small batches, and that had emotional value, all while caring for a small child.

"It was a doorway into my art practice again," Bayouth said.

At markets like the Renegade Craft Fair, Bayouth's work often draws women across many ages. Bayouth finds older women respond frequently to her female-figured sculptures, while a younger crowd is drawn to her catlike creatures.

Occupational therapist Wendy Self, 57, purchased a number of Bayouth's creatures. Some she gave to family members, and others she keeps on her windowsill, dining table or desk at work.

An Altadena resident, Self also lost her home in the Eaton fire. She finds a protective quality in Bayouth's sculptures, almost as if they're a "little guardian."

"I think it's sort of magical," Self said of Bayouth's style. "It has a lot of whimsy in it, but it also has a balance of light and dark in terms of how it makes you feel."

Like Self, many of Bayouth's customers have been affected by the fire. One woman from a recent fair stands out in Bayouth's memory. Her house burned down too, and shortly after, her husband died.

The customer bought an angel figure, fashioned with tears on her face and arms holding her chest. It would become the first piece of art in the customer's new home, Bayouth recalled.

Bayouth doesn't make designs for her ceramics. She might add images or poems to the work, not knowing why until she meets the person who buys it.

She remembers the woman holding the angel, saying, "She is me."

They embraced each other for a long time.

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