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Ninon Choplin’s secret to interior design is children’s furniture from Ikea. It sounds strange at first—especially considering that the Paris-born, Los Angeles-based ceramicist’s products include smoking pipes. But when Choplin, who uses gender neutral pronouns, recently moved into a new home in LA’s Highland Park neighborhood and made a quick stop at the Swedish home goods chain, they found themselves back in the kids’ section perusing the small-ish, yet functional, assortment of Fritids-es, Trofasts and Vimunds.
“Nobody ever thinks about it,” they say, offering up their proprietary knowledge. “The first time I went to Ikea and picked something from the kids’ side, I had to ask, ‘Am I allowed to buy this?’”
The 27-year-old has never had a bedroom they were fully at peace habitating, but this new domicile, adorned with a mishmash of colorful furniture, houseplants at varying stages of liveness, and inhabited also by a rabbit, feels like home, Choplin says. The mention of Choplin’s living conditions is unsurprising considering the nature of their work: beyond the pipes of varying noodle-like shapes are equally curvaceous bright and cartoonish ceramic work mugs, tumblers, teapots, planters. Choplin injects playfulness into the seriousness of design with their company Neenineen (pronounced neen neen neen).
Choplin was first introduced to artistic endeavors as a child by their maternal grandparents—grandpa was a painter, grandma worked in clay. Between their introduction and formal classes, Choplin was immersed in various media. And in a city like Paris, populated with centuries-old cathedrals and Haussmann-style apartment buildings, large-scale shapes and designs subtly percolated into Choplin’s creative subconscious. Despite spending the first 16 years of their life in France’s capital, it was a move to the United States that cemented Choplin’s decision to professionally pursue art. After finishing high school in upstate New York, Choplin studied industrial design at Rhode Island School of Design, a path they might not have taken in France. “The U.S. thinks that France is super open minded about these [artistic] things,” Choplin says. “I moved to America and all these options were open finally for me and I realized that this path toward design was an option.”
After graduating in 2014, Choplin moved to Los Angeles, another architecturally intriguing city, however Choplin was struck by the buildings’ colors, the variety of styles — from Art Deco to mid-century modern. “It’s kind of surprising and weird. You drive down the street and there’s 10 different kinds of architecture and you wonder what happened.” There, Choplin took their first wheel throwing class three years ago and almost immediately enrolled as a member at the studio, spending their evenings at the wheel following their day job working for a local furniture designer. One of their first pieces, Choplin remembers, was reminiscent of fellow L.A. ceramicist Ben Medansky. After noodling around with other work, Choplin found their visual ilk, using “wiggly” shapes as both handles on mugs and painted on the item itself.
As a rebellion from the stern world of design, where creators carried themselves with self importance and creations appeared heavy and cumbersome, Choplin founded Neenineen in 2017, an indie ceramics brand with a purposefully difficult-to-pronounce name. “It’s kind of fun for me to see people struggle with it.” Focusing on primary colors and looping shapes, the pieces inspire frivilosity, like you might float down a lazy river on a bright yellow inner tube while smoking from Choplin’s Tobogan Pipe. “I was so tired of seeing people so serious about their design work,” they say. “I kept going to design week in New York every year and seeing the same materials put together and the same people looking at you like they’ve made it and they have this special style that nobody else has. Everything looked the same and looked really somber and it was lacking a little bit of fun for me.”
Now that people aren’t going to be hiding the pieces that they smoke out of, they should buy something that’s pretty that they can put on the table and show off.
One of Choplin’s outlets for infusing whimsy in their designs was in ceramic smoking pipes. With California’s friendly cannabis outlook and the state’s 2016’s legalization of recreational consumption, Choplin found there was ample opportunity to create functional pieces that could double as art. “Now that people aren’t going to be hiding the pieces that they smoke out of, they should buy something that’s pretty that they can put on the table and show off.”
Choplin’s first pipes, a Gumby-like wave of clay, were created using a process known as slip casting, where liquified clay is poured into a mold and allows for more large-scale production. Neenineen’s most recent run of pipes, dubbed Tobogan, were inspired by the shape of water park slides. “I really loved the tube slides that twist and turn everywhere,” Choplin says. After a few hours of poring through water slide image results on Google, they settled on the piece’s U-shape. (Choplin is currently in a similar ideation process for planters inspired by children’s sandbox shovels and pails.)
Choplin created Tobogan’s first iteration by hand to get a sense of the pipe’s physicality, how it felt to hold. Irked by the mold’s slight imperfections, Choplin instead designed a new version digitally, tweaking the length and roundness, and had it 3D printed, a process they also use on select tumblers. (Everything else is made by hand on the wheel.) “It comes with my background in industrial design,” they say. “I know how to 3D model, and I’m such a stickler for good geometry, that sometimes I think it’ll be easier to spend a little time to model on a computer and waiting for the thing to be printed and for the thing to be perfect rather than doing it by hand.”
Once Choplin receives the 3D-printed mock-up from an off-site printing service, they’ll create a plaster mold of the figure, into which they’ll pour the liquid clay for slip casting. “After I get the right thickness,” Choplin explains, “I pour out the inside so I get this shell.” From there, Choplin cleans up the figure and hand paints the pipes, a process Choplin shares on Instagram.
Like many ceramicists, Instagram has proved a worthy platform: They’re able to showcase their work, their studio. And, perhaps most importantly, Neenineen’s finished products are fitting for an Instagram audience—colorful, quirky, likeable. The social network has not only put Choplin’s work in front of potential customers’ eyes, but it’s connected them to a community of other ceramicists, both in Los Angeles and elsewhere.
Contrary to the belief that those in creative fields are competitive and backstabbing, Choplin has found an empowering and uplifting group of fellow artists who share trade secrets. Maybe the positive energy stems from the fact that there is a high population of women, queer, and nonbinary artists in the ceramics world, Choplin theorizes.
Whatever the case, Choplin is blithely living in their primary colored world, full of shapes, peppy pipes and mugs, and uncommon brand names. It’s a delicate line to walk between business owner and carefree creator, one Choplin takes in stride. “I thought maybe I’ll have to change it if I get serious,” Choplin muses of Neenineen’s crafty pronunciation, “then I thought, do I want to be serious?”
