Hana Rucker

THE ALCHEMIST

Written by Mamie Stevenson Morago; Photographed by Jason Quigley

In the universe according to Hana Rucker, boredom is the perfect catalyst for creativity. “If my kids come up to me to tell me they’re bored,” she begins, “I tell them, ‘How amazing! What do you think will come of it?’”

Unlike today’s youth, this welder-sculptor-ceramicist was not afforded the distraction of a television, the stimulation of a smartphone, or even the company of a consistent friend throughout her childhood. Born in California’s Bay Area, Rucker (née Kaufman) was raised by self-proclaimed “hippies in hiding”—a couple appearing as conventional yuppies who were anything but. When she was eight, Rucker’s family sold their belongings and packed everything into a trailer hitched to a van, where they lived for the next two years as they roamed the United States. “We kind of just traveled with the weather,” she says. “Nowhere to be, nothing to do.”

Rucker was expected to rely on her own drive and imagination as a means for entertainment. It makes sense, then, that so much of her artistic inspiration later in life would come from found objects and scrap materials. Ingenuity is at the heart of her work and worldview, begging the question, What can be made from this?

For Rucker, early teachers came in the form of local experts, landmarks, and her bright, whimsical mother, Annie. History lessons were implicit in the national parks and monuments the family visited; run-ins with wild animals—a pack of bear cubs, once—provided real-world applications of survival skills and knowledge of the animal kingdom; and answers to questions were readily available inside Annie’s extensive collection of encyclopedias. In fact, when Rucker’s father, Greg, was investigating a problem with the van’s brakes, he discovered that his wife, unwilling to part with her beloved books, had hidden away hundreds upon hundreds of pounds of encyclopedias in the trailer’s secret compartments.

Creating was a way to pass time on the road. Whether playwriting, dancing, or constructing mystical woodland dioramas alongside her mother, Rucker learned from a young age how to alchemize the ordinary into something new and unexpected. This not only helped her find outlets for creative expression, but also taught her the value of reinvention as her family moved from one community to another. “My mom’s…eccentricities,” Rucker pauses, smirking as she chooses her words, “offered me a lot of power. ‘You can be whoever you want,’ she told me. ‘You can totally reinvent yourself; you can tell everyone you’re from the circus—no one’s gonna know.’”

From this perspective, Rucker’s work, like her creative identity, has always been shapeshifting, building on itself. She constantly experiments with new mediums, materials, and concepts, from designing t-shirts to throwing clay to torching metal. “I literally will do everything, and ideally more than one thing at a time,” Rucker says. “I want to be spinning plates.”

Spinning plates has more than one application inside the Rucker home, tucked away deep in Portland’s Milwaukie suburb. In addition to housing the artist’s ceramics workspace, where she creates the modern, Pollack-esque kitchen wares behind Whip Ceramics, the Ruckers’ midcentury ranch-style abode is also a laboratory of sorts for one of Portland’s most renowned chefs, Hana’s husband and “biggest hype-man,” Gabriel Rucker of Le Pigeon.

The two met in 2003 while working at the now-closed Gotham Tavern, where other legendary local chefs like Beast’s Naomi Pomeroy and Bunk’s Tommy Habetz also started out. A far cry from the brown rice, bagged salad, and bland chicken of her youth, Rucker discovered uncharted realms of creativity through Gabriel’s culinary explorations. “Everything was new to me; it was like Through the Looking Glass,” the artist says. “This whole world of food existed.”

Despite learning the fundamentals of cooking from her husband, Rucker resists exactitude, declaring, “The way I cook is the way I make art. I absolutely refuse to follow a recipe.”

This philosophy has made Rucker’s artistic trajectory unconventional. For example, when studying the fundamentals of ceramics under the mentorship of vitrifiedstudio’s Shelley Martin, Rucker learned the wheel but felt restricted by the “rules” of pottery.

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Yet, Rucker persisted in her craft and learned others along the way, prioritizing creative, independent outlets to balance the demands of parenthood. In 2011, she and Gabriel welcomed their first child, Gus (now 12), followed by Babette, 10, and Freddy, 6.

“I always looked for opportunities that made me feel like I had an identity outside the home,” Rucker states, “so that I had something to talk about with people and something to connect with other than the isolation of motherhood.”

When the kids were still quite young, Rucker saw an advertisement for sculpture classes at the home of her neighbor, Carole Murphy, and was excited by the prospect for experimentation and flexibility in form.

“I was going so quickly through the class, slapping things together, that Carole told me, ‘This isn’t how you make art,’” Rucker recalls. “I told her, ‘I have three kids; I don’t have time—I just want to make something.’”

Her experience with sculpture inspired Rucker to pursue a Welding Fundamentals course at Clackamas Community College, and from there, the role of metalworker was added to her growing repertoire. “For some reason, working with metal clicked,” Rucker says. “I could see things in the art.”

Taking cues from nature and the Japanese practice of ikebana (flower arrangement), Rucker transforms heavy, monotonous metals into delicate yet playful statues that bring life to the material. Sometimes the artist mixes mediums, welding steel around ceramic objects or incorporating found driftwood, as is the case with a beloved dam-like sculpture the family keeps in their backyard. In the spirit of a true alchemist, Rucker declares, “I want to make it feel like the metal is not metal anymore.”

In October 2023, Rucker joined forces with three other Pacific Northwest artists in Bingen, Washington, to cocreate a weekend-long art show focused on the life cycle of salmon as they migrate through the Columbia River Gorge and its tributaries. Delicate blue-spotted ceramic frogs and fish swim through angular, jagged, rusted metal shapes, creating a juxtaposition that feels like it belongs specifically to the artist: equal parts primitive and surprising.

This show would have been unimaginable for Rucker only two years prior–and not only due to the disruption created by the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2021, she was diagnosed with colon cancer, after years of seeking explanations for her symptoms while navigating the often unfeeling and bureaucratic healthcare system. Due to pandemic-related restrictions, Rucker had to undergo much of her treatment in isolation, but found meaningful reflection in solitude, taking stock of her energy and where she wanted to direct it.

With newfound priorities and, eventually, a clean bill of health, Rucker refocused her attention on what she could make next. “It was a year of so much information and revelation,” she emphasizes, “and the first thing I did when I felt up to it was get right back on the wheel.”

Whereas most of us define success in terms of stability, Rucker finds purpose in novelty, never sticking to one label or identity long enough to be defined by it. And undeterred by the unknown, she would rather embark on a process of discovery with the unfamiliar than waste precious time in the monotonous pursuit of perfection.

Like the metal, clay, and other materials she works with, Rucker understands the implicit resilience in malleability—a quality she has honed since her nomadic childhood. Reinvention served Rucker then, and now, in her seasoned, established life in Portland, a city characterized by the very artisanship she, her husband, and their friends have cultivated over the last two decades.

Yet, looking out over the expansive, tree-lined suburban backyard from the cozy nook of her ceramics studio, one senses that Hana Rucker is staying put for a while–that, perhaps, the wanderer has finally found her roots.

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27 Hana Rucker

THE ALCHEMIST

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