Waves, Frozen in Clay: Ben Medansky at Santa Monica Proper

Ben Medansky traces his love of clay back to Silly Putty. It sounds like a small origin story, but it captures something essential about how he works: the pull of a material that rewards touch, resists control, and never quite resolves into something predictable.

Medansky runs a studio of about five people out of Frogtown, Los Angeles. Together they create large-scale experiential art pieces installed in hotels, residences, museums, and galleries around the world. He studied at an arts high school and an arts college, committing early to a medium he knew would never run out of room to grow. “There was really no end game,” he says. “This material could constantly feel new and fresh.”

His work at Santa Monica Proper began with a prompt from designer Kelly Wearstler: make something like shells, but not shells. It was deliberately open-ended, and Medansky sat with it. The answer came, unexpectedly, from the sky. Flying out of LAX one afternoon, he looked down at the coastline and watched the waves breaking below in miniature. He began to wonder what it would look like if those waves were frozen mid-crash, suspended in time the way a shell captures the memory of the ocean. That image became the conceptual foundation for what would eventually be installed as the wave wall and the pool wall at Santa Monica Proper.

The physical process was just as intuitive. Medansky threw large flat slabs of clay, then folded, ripped, and tore them until he found shapes with what he describes as a “beautiful poetic rhythm.” From there, his studio experimented with glazes before ultimately deciding to use none. The final pieces are raw stoneware, high-fired, in a clay body chosen specifically because its color matches the sand on the Santa Monica beach just outside.

What keeps Medansky returning to clay, he says, is the uncertainty of it. You form something, you put it in the kiln, and then something shifts. The heat takes over. The work becomes something you didn’t entirely plan. He describes this as a Dadaist approach, a philosophy built around chance and spontaneity, around inviting outside forces to have a hand in the outcome. The kiln, in that sense, is less a tool than a collaborator.

His relationship with Kelly Wearstler and Proper Hotels developed over several years, starting with smaller projects before growing into the large-scale murals at both Downtown Proper and Santa Monica Proper. Medansky speaks about the partnership with clear enthusiasm, particularly around Wearstler’s approach to sourcing art. Rather than filling spaces with mass-produced work, Proper actively seeks out local artists in each city, people who understand the specific texture of a place. In Austin, San Francisco, Santa Monica, the art is meant to feel like it could only exist there.

“You can instantly feel the difference,” Medansky says, “between being in a place that really thought about the art and someone that just bought things from a random website.” At Proper, the thinking shows.