Her ceramics are as imaginative as her 'Adventure Time' storyboard art

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Artist Ako Castuera is best known for her work on the award-winning animated series “Adventure Time.” As a writer and storyboard artist, she helped intrepid heroes Jake the Dog and Finn the Human become iconic toon characters.Though she brought flying rainbow unicorns and a platoon of plotting penguins to life on screen, there’s more to Castuera’s resume than hyper-imaginative animation.The Echo Park-based creative is also a professional ceramicist whose hand-built vessels and sculptures have been on display at the Japanese American National Museum of Art, Oxy Arts and the Oakland Museum of Art.In this series, we highlight independent makers and artists, from glassblowers to fiber artists, who are creating original products in and around Los Angeles.While Castuera’s studio is filled with its fair share of playful “Pee-wee’s Playhouse”-themed ceramic charms and anthropomorphic banana figurines, her craft is just as much devoted to highlighting Southern California’s natural resources and Indigenous people, as well as her own Mexican-Japanese heritage.“‘Whimsy’ is a word that’s been applied to my work a lot.This is not my word,” she said during a recent tour of the Monrovia workspace she shares with her husband, artist Rob Sato, and fellow ceramicist Rosie Brand.

Ako Castuera’s work is anthropological and at times unusual, like her foot box sculptures.She also feels a special connection to her tools.

(Kayla Bartkowski / Los Angeles Times) “Not that whimsy is negative, but I do feel like it doesn’t really get a handle on the substance of what I feel I’m working with, as far as the depth of the clay, the depth of the experience, of the land.”She sat perched on a stool at her workbench, using a smooth stone to grind soil clumps into fine dust as she talked.She collects the red earth during nature walks around the San Gabriel Mountains area — w...