Daniela Krahe
Daniela Krahe’s ceramic practice centers on mortality and the conditions of a peaceful earthly departure. Working primarily with underglaze painting, sgraffito, and other surface techniques, she approaches clay as both a material and a witness. Her interest lies in how fear and anxiety surrounding death might be eased through intention, preparation, environment, and a person’s right to choose how they leave the world. Clay, which carries traces of both human and natural histories, offers a medium that will endure beyond its maker, reinforcing her commitment to creating with deliberateness and care.
Her artistic inquiry is inseparable from her medical life. Krahe has worked as an EMT during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, served as an artificial heart engineer supporting patients with heart failure, and is now a medical student at Johns Hopkins with a focus on emergency medicine and palliative care. Alongside her clinical training, she has researched the history of advance directives, living wills, and Do Not Resuscitate orders in North American medicine. Through this work, she has observed a tension in American culture: widespread fascination with death in popular media paired with discomfort and uncertainty when confronting personal mortality. Her ceramics respond to that gap, aiming to create space for reflection and agency when death becomes imminent.
In 2025, Krahe began an annual project of making her own urns as a way to mark both personal time and artistic growth. The first piece in the series, Urn for 26th Birthday, required confronting the practical and emotional realities of designing an object intended for her own remains. After throwing the vessel and lid, she spent several days painting three crows in flight around the urn’s circumference. Her surname in German translates to crow, and the motif became a quiet assertion of identity and continuity. While she hopes the urn will not be needed for many years, the project establishes a form of acceptance grounded in preparation rather than fear.
Krahe was introduced to ceramics during the COVID-19 pandemic and, after a year of study, was invited to teach private lessons at her studio. She has since found the medium capable of holding the emotional range encountered in medical practice. Shaping and decorating clay requires patience, gentleness, and intention, qualities that parallel the care she studies and provides. Although she has not followed a traditional academic path in ceramics, she has built her education through local studio classes, community woodfirings, time at Penland School of Craft, and teaching wheel-throwing in her Baltimore neighborhood. These experiences continue to shape her respect for clay and reinforce her understanding of ceramics as a lifelong practice, rooted in attention, humility, and the shared conditions of living and dying.
