Hello: Ana Magro | Ceramic Artist

I was born and raised in rural Portugal, close to the border, in a village small enough that everyone still knows your name. Joshua and I met in our last year of high school. It was an immediate "this is it" connection, even that young, and we've grown together since, through every season of it: the laughing, the crying, the loving, the building.

In 2016 I moved to Manchester to study psychology, then forensic psychology, full of ideals about how I was going to change the system. I went on to work in women's shelters, listening, trying to provide comfort and space for healing. But the more I learned, the more I listened, the more my values diverged from the rules I was working inside of. It left me in a real inner crisis: this career I'd chosen was just cleaning up the mess the system was designed to create.

I found ceramics while looking for something manual, something meditative. I've always loved working with my hands, and two-dimensional art had always felt slightly overwhelming with possibility. Vonetta came with me to that very first class, and it was her encouragement that kept me going back. I fell in love with the wheel, though the wheel took its time warming up to me, and enrolled for my own space in a studio where I practiced when I wasn't working.

Then we had our first child, Elijah, and my worldview changed completely. Or at least my priorities did. The city no longer made sense if it meant sacrificing the energy and time we could spend with him. We moved to Vale de Moses in 2022 so Eli could grow up surrounded by his family, and gradually started helping out with retreats. In 2024, Samara Maria was born, here at Vale de Moses, the first baby born on this land in probably eighty years.

Since coming back I've set up a fully functioning studio, and found such joy in sharing this craft, first with friends, then with guests. What started as something I needed for myself has slowly become something I get to give: I now run ceramics workshops for the guests who come through Vale de Moses, and lead the ceramic side of our Conscious Arts Retreats, hand building, painting, wheel throwing, watching people meet the clay for the first time the way I once did. There's a value in this craft that goes well beyond the finished piece. Though sipping tea from a mug you made from scratch is quite nice too.

My pieces lean into the technicality of the wheel, the way it repays time and effort with more possibilities. I'm drawn to organic forms that can be used and loved every day, the way humans have been making and reaching for these same shapes for thousands of years. There's a universe of knowledge and exciting discoveries in the alchemy of clay and glazes that I continue to explore (my high school chemistry teacher would be gobsmacked). For now, I'll let the pictures do the talking.

These days, alongside the clay, I look after communications for Vale de Moses, the social posts, the open calls, the small details of telling this place's story as honestly as I can.

Connect with Ana: Instagram