Her Lang’ata studio mirrors that rawness, balancing industrial cement interiors with lush green exteriors. On one wall, hundreds of colourful tiles line the shelves; many more spill across the centre tables. They look like miniature artworks, soft gradients of rainbow hues – each a record in her vast archive of glazing experiments.

Lana admits she rarely begins with a fixed vision for colour. Some pieces have sat on her shelf for three years as she waits for the right combination to reveal itself. “Nobody is rushing me,” she says. “I go to these works when it feels right.” Yet even with her meticulous cataloguing, the kiln always has the final say. The clay’s mineral mix, the time it was sourced, even a slight shift in temperature, can all impact the final colour.

Glazing is one of the final stages in making a ceramic piece, but it’s not the only fragile process. Lana sources her clay from Nyeri, a town in Kenya’s central highlands, where potters have been harvesting it for generations. Its natural impurities make it both beautiful and temperamental. Drying can take months, and kiln firings often end in cracks. “A lot of the time, the unexpected happens,” she says. “But I’ve learned to embrace the imperfections – either by highlighting them, or turning them into something else,” she says. One of these- mishaps-turned masterpieces was from a large set of bar stools that cracked in the kiln. She decided to chip away at them, and in doing so was inspired to repurpose them into a mosaic canvas, now a signature in her collection.