I LOVE ANYTHING made by hand. Once, while driving cross-country in my 20s, I nearly killed myself (and the passenger in my car) by flipping a U-turn on I-40 in Oklahoma; I was trying to hightail it back to a billboard I'd noticed advertising a quilt barn. The store was a flop, but the memory of the adrenaline rush remains. And in the years since, between traveling and picking through flea markets, I've managed to amass a sizable collection of outsider art, handmade objects, and specialized local crafts from around the world.

The word “craft” can have a downmarket connotation when it sits next to “art,” but the difference is purely semantic. What we call crafts are art forms that have historically been the creative pursuits of women: quilts, clothing, and ceramics, to name a few. Despite my aforementioned risk-taking tendencies toward quilts, ceramics may be my favorite. I find their usefulness, tactile qualities, and the sheer variety of them completely irresistible. And they are useful. Many ceramics hold flowers, and flowers are right up there with scent as the fastest and most effective means of changing the feeling of a space.

At this point in my life, I am told that I am hard to shop for, but ceramics are a pretty sure win, so I get a lot of them. My husband describes my taste as leaning toward pieces that look like they were made by children, but are very expensive. And honestly, I can’t argue with that assessment. At a friend’s recent ceramics sale, I found myself handling some small and wonderfully weird objects that she told me were, indeed, the work of her 10-year-old son. Kids’ art is often distinctly wonderful because it is imperfect and not bound by constraints, qualities I admire in some of my favorite ceramicists.

The wish list below is far from exhaustive. In fact, narrowing it down to five was the biggest challenge. These are a few of the ceramic artists whose pieces I most covet right now.