About
Tantri Mustika
Tantri Mustika is a Melbourne-born ceramic artist of Balinese and European heritage. She hand-builds lamps, vessels and wall pieces in marbled, striped and carved stoneware at her studio in Carnegie, Melbourne.
Her work has been shown at Melbourne Design Week, Craft Victoria and JamFactory, and featured in The Design Files Magazine and Vogue Living.
“The work is teaching me about myself in real time.”
Tantri Mustika
Work in progress, in the studio
A wheel in hard rubbish
Before clay, Tantri cut hair for a decade. The business began with a pottery wheel she walked past several times one morning on her way to work at a barbershop: full of dirt, its electrical cord cut. Her boss helped her drag it down a Fitzroy back alley, and between clients Tantri stood outside with a hose, scrubbing it clean.
That afternoon an electrician came in for a haircut. He took the wheel back to his workshop in exchange for a free cut and some beer, and sent her a video about ten minutes later. It was spinning perfectly. “That felt like a sign,” she says.
Balinese, European, Melburnian
Tantri was born and raised in Melbourne. Her dad is Balinese; her mum’s family is European, with Russian and German heritage. Growing up, she was the Balinese cousin in Australia and the Australian cousin in Bali.
Bali is her second home, and its brickwork, carving, weaving, batik and sculpture were in her visual library long before she named them. Some of it came from her mum, too: the starry wallflowers grew out of something she used to say, “Everything is written in the stars.” Lately Tantri has been bringing all of it together on purpose, most of all in the carved Ukiran work.
“It feels good now to come home to the part of myself I pushed away.”
Her work now
Tantri spent years testing each technique on its own: terrazzo first, then marbled checks and stripes, then carving. Now she mixes them in ways you wouldn’t expect, and the mix is her signature. She makes fewer pieces than she used to and gives each one more time, which is where the larger carved vessels, wall pieces and lamps have come from.
The lamps began with a simple pleasure; in her words, she gets “a kick out of making useful things out of mud.” Her Flow State floor lamp was shown at Melbourne Design Week in 2025, and The Design Files Magazine featured her lighting in Issue 04.
She is also one of the Australian designers and makers commissioned for the 30 residential apartments at Powerhouse Parramatta. The museum opens in late 2026.
Her techniques
All four techniquesCarving, marbling, layering and inlay: how each one works, and where they meet.
Commissions
Start a commissionLamps, vessels and wall pieces made for one particular room, from first conversation to delivery.
Press
Read the pressHer lighting in The Design Files Magazine, Issue 04, and coverage in Vogue Living, Broadsheet and more.
