We stumbled upon the newly founded small batch porcelain and stoneware company, Lōm Ceramics, and instantly fell in love with their delicate craftsmanship, and knew we had to get our hands on some of their work.

Their collection of translucent porcelain luminaries have become an everyday ritual in our home to light, instantly warming the areas which are lucky enough to house them. We were so impressed with the quality and general ethos of Lōm Ceramics, and are thrilled to have sat down with the owners, Dave Tarullo and Risha Druckman, to hear more about their background, process, and inspiration.

What are both of your professional backgrounds and how did Lōm Ceramics come to fruition?

Dave: I have been working in clay for over 20 years, since I was a freshman in high school. It became my central focus after I finished undergrad. That’s when I started learning production pottery and slip casting. I worked under a master mold maker from Laguna Clay who taught me his craft, and spent time training in wood fired pottery, and sculpture before deciding to pursue my Masters, at the University of Montana. I was fortunate to work with three greats in the field of ceramics: Trey Hill, Julia Galloway, and Beth Lo. I taught ceramics and 3D design while earning my degree. After that I moved to Southern Arizona to teach at Cochise College and work with a a non-profit arts group called the Boarder Arts Corridor. I’ve been here in southern Arizona now for about five years.

Risha: My path to ceramics was much more circuitous than Dave’s. I earned my Ph.D in Environmental History and the History of Science from Duke University. After more than a decade in academia, however, I chose to leave my post-doc appointment in order to devote myself to my creative pursuits—chiefly music and painting. I wanted to prioritize those aspects of my life again; so I moved back to Arizona, took on more violin students, started painting, and began training in the art of millinery with one of the oldest hat makers in the country. The atelier and hat-making workshop here is very old world--filled with specialized antique tools that we use every day. And I discovered that the pleasure I derived from working with my hands as a hat maker, and later as a ceramicist, was akin to the pleasure I felt working with my hands as a musician, but toward a different end. When I met Dave, I was teaching violin and making hats for a living and painting in my spare time.

Dave had been working on a line of functional ware with two friends for a few years, and when that partnership dissolved I stepped in. We were dating at the time, and our conversations about how he should move forward with his line just organically developed into a business partnership. We would talk about forms and surfaces and Dave started teaching me the technical side of ceramics. We have a similar aesthetic sensibility, and our respective graduate school training means we approach the process of critique similarly, which is useful for developing work.

How do you divide & conquer when working together?

Dave: There are some fairly clear lines owing to our respective educations. Risha usually leads the way in glaze testing and surfaces, as well as marketing, styling, communications, and website work, and I usually focus on mold making, casting, and other technical aspects of the business, as well as packing and shipping work, (shipping ceramics without breaking them takes some finesse!).

Where we really come together is in design. Most of the time Risha comes up with an idea and we kinda toss it back and forth thinking about aesthetics and function and its feasibility before moving on to the next phase of production.

Do you have anyone else on your team, or is it just the two of you handling it all?

Risha: For the most part it’s just the two of us. Ultimately, we would love to bring people in and delegate more of our responsibilities so that everyone involved is not only doing what they love but what they do best, be that product design, mold making and production, web design, photography etc. There are so many elements to this business, it would feel really good to support other people in their particular line of work and specialization. We anticipate shifting more and more in this direction as the business grows.

That said, we are very fortunate to have a friend—Daniela Dawson—who we could hire to take product photos for our website, and we currently have a web and marketing specialist who is evaluating our site and making changes and recommendations…so the delegating had already started here and there, and the results have been great. We’re ready for more delegating haha!

Why Bisbee, AZ, and what do you like best about living there?

Dave: I moved here for a couple reasons: first, I was offered a teaching position at Cochise College where I would have access to a large wood kiln and the opportunity to teach students about this particular form of firing, which I’m really passionate about. Wood firing is a highly specialized and labor intensive form of ceramic firing in which wood is the only fuel used to heat the kiln. The kiln is stoked entirely by hand for the duration of the firing which can last up to a week and a half (day and night) reaching temperatures over ~2400 degrees Fahrenheit, (Cone 12). As an atmospheric form of firing, the ceramic surfaces achieved through wood firing are the combined effect of the flame and ash inside the kiln interacting with the clay. It’s an awe-inspiring process that produces incredible results, and not many community colleges have wood kilns, so it was a great offer.

Risha, by comparison, grew up here and after twenty years decided to move back to be closer to her family. So the quick answer is that that Bisbee is where we were when we started working together.

Risha: We both love the desert—the subtlety of its colors and seasons, the large expansive landscape and the feeling of space it provides. And we draw a lot of inspiration from the colors of the landscape here. I think people sometimes associate deserts with a lack of color, but that couldn’t be further from the truth: turquoise skies, red rocks and earth, yellow grasses, purple clouds at dusk…so many pastels! We take a lot of walks in the desert, and I love thinking about the relationships among the colors, and figuring out how to translate those relationships into our work.

I would also add that part of what drew me back to Bisbee was the creative community here. For a small town Bisbee has a remarkably vibrant and supportive artist community—visual artists, performers, musicians, poets, writers, potters….you name it. That said, Dave and I do sometimes question whether this is the ideal place for us to pursue this business, the relatively remote and rural nature of the town are not the first things that come to mind when one considers ideal locations for launching a small business. Dave is from Southern California, arguably one of the hottest ceramics markets in the country, and here we are in Bisbee! It’s kind of funny!…We’ll see what happens.

Is the climate of the southwest ideal for manufacturing ceramics?

Dave: The desert certainly has its advantages. Clay dries quicker in arid environments. It is surprising how important the drying process is, because as clay dries it becomes harder but also more fragile. Anyone who has worked in ceramics for a little while knows that timing is everything when it comes to clay. Knowing what things can or should be done at different stages of drying is crucial. You really have a specific window to perform each task. If you do something to the clay too early in the drying process the clay may not be able to support itself and fall, but if you wait too long the clay may be too hard to join or cut. Many, many pieces find their way into the recycle bin for this reason.

So, in the desert the drying process is sped up dramatically which allows for things to move quickly, but also limits the time each piece is in that sweet spot. Fortunately we can slow down the process by covering work in plastic or with a piece of fabric. The climate here is also good for slip casting (which we do a lot of), because the aridity efficiently dries the casting molds after each use, thereby reducing the amount of time the molds need to rest between castings. So we are able to cast more often than we would in a more humid environment.

Conversely, speeding up the drying process, for both clay and for molds, which people struggle with in more humid environments is certainly more challenging and takes more energy.

Is there a ceramics community in the southwest?

Dave: Aside from the region’s indigenous communities, who have a long tradition of producing beautiful work, much of the ceramics community in the southwest centers itself around colleges, universities, and community studios, as it does in much of the country. One of the things that makes ceramics unique from other disciplines is that it requires sizable and costly infrastructure, kilns, clay mixers, etcetera, which are generally easier for a collective (rather than an individual) to invest in, not only to offset the cost, but for reasons of space as well—kilns are big. And particular types of firing necessitate community as well. In wood-firing, for example the coordination of multiple people is often required because the firing is done entirely by hand, day and night, for days. Community is a necessity in ceramics and that’s one of the reasons I have such a deep love for it. Everyone has to come together to make it happen.

Our local ceramics community is quite strong and Cochise College has a lot to do with that. But we also have close relationships with people in Tucson, Phoenix, and up into the Verdi Valley where we wood fire at Reitz Ranch—the former studio of the renowned ceramic artist Don Reitz—which is now an incredible clay center.

Is your studio in or close to your home? How do you cultivate a sustainable work/life balance?

Dave: We’re fortunate that our studio is close to home—just five minutes away! In terms of pacing, wood firing lends itself to intense periods of making in the time leading up to a firing, followed by a period of rest afterwards. I’m not sure if that’s balanced, but I do think its pretty suitable for my demeanor, and it’s how a lot of artists tend to work. That said, clay likes to be tended to, so I’m in the studio about six days a week, often seven, regardless of whether we have a wood firing coming up or not.

Risha: We’re in one of those high pace moments as we speak—preparing for a wood firing in late April where we’re planning to fire approximately 250 pieces, while simultaneously testing colors and casting samples for a tinted porcelain line we’ve been developing. We’re also researching cameras and thinking about how we want to photograph this new collection, contacting stockists etc…it’s always a juggling act, but we’re both really passionate about the work and very deliberate in our pacing. I think what’s important is that the pace and intensity (high or low) is more or less a choice, rather than an imposition.

How do you conceptualize a new collection and where does your inspiration come from?

Risha: Our first collection started with a single piece: the Double-handle Paloma mug. It’s a beautiful, modern design, with soft curves, that feels so good in the hand, and we wanted to build off of those elements—the modernity, the simplicity, the soft curves, and its ergonomic emphasis. So that was our starting point. There is inherently more freedom at the start of a collection, and the parameters gradually narrow as the collection develops. The reason for this is that each new piece has to work with the forms that precede it, so with the addition of each new form the constraints increase—an elaboration on the general tenor of the collection as a whole, and in dialogue with the other pieces. In this sense, a collection tends to direct itself and tell us what it needs.

Conceptualizing a new collection happens in a similar way: in reaction to work that already exists. But in a new collection the trajectory points away from the current collection’s components rather than toward them. Our Paloma collection is cast, for example, with a sleek, modern ethos. In response to that, we’ve been developing a tableware collection that is thrown and decidedly rustic—the Baba set. Or take our Woodfire collection for example, which is extremely elegant. After our last firing I was hungry for something that felt more light-hearted and playful as a counterpoint. That’s how our tinted porcelain series started, in reaction to the current collection. The forms are the same but the surfaces are dramatically different—bright, cheerful, and painterly. This new porcelain series is also building on the tinted porcelain work we’ve done in the past with our luminaries, and expanding that conversation into functional ware.

How long is the process from design to conception on any given piece?

Dave: There is a lot of variation in how long it takes to create a re-producible form. Producing a piece that will be cast is a much longer process than creating work on the wheel, for example, and casting is the bulk of what we do. If everything were to go perfectly, which it almost never does, we could probably go from design to production in a month. In most cases it’s closer to three months. And in a few cases we have been working out a design for well over a year.

What do you find most challenging about your business?

Dave: I think for the most part it’s dealing with the nature of clay. I don’t think many people realize how challenging it is to create something repeatable and truly good. There are so many aspects and variables to making a successful piece. Countless tests of glazes and clay bodies all of which are significantly affected by application and firing type and schedules. But it’s also this amazingly complex puzzle and extremely rewarding when you get it all put together.

Risha: I completely agree. There are so many variables to consider with each and every piece: what making process is best suited to the form i.e. slip casting, throwing, or hand building, for example; what type of clay body to use; how to fire the work; what the optimal firing schedule is; considerations pertaining to design--functionality, proportion, strength etc; what surface you're trying to achieve, and whether it makes sense to color the clay body, or to use glazes, or underglazes, or atmosphere alone…and on and on.

It feels like a seemingly endless array of decisions and variables to contend with, many of which are at odds with one another. It's difficult to get all the elements to line up. And the stream of failures on the way to a successful outcome demands a thick skin—not my strong suit. I've had to adjust my expectations around results and time frames for completion and that's been really difficult at times. Maybe that matte surface I love is is a bad idea if we're trying to avoid scratching and staining, for example; or maybe the clay body I prefer just isn't a viable option because of its tendency to warp. All of these things take time to work out. And sometimes after months of testing and working toward a goal we find that it's just not going to work. That’s hard. I've had to let go of a lot of ideas that after trial proved inviable. As Dave said, however, the challenge is ultimately what makes successful final results so tremendously satisfying.

What do you hope the future holds for Lōm Ceramics?

Risha: In the grand scheme of things we are singularly committed to creating beautiful, thoughtfully designed handmade functional ware; and to nurturing our creative processes and inspiration. And while we aren’t committed to a specific vision of what that looks like in the long term, we do know where we’re looking in the short term.

First, we would like to expand our wholesale market. Pottery is such a tactile and intimate craft, and because every piece we make is one of a kind, and because we spend so much time in our design process thinking not only about function but about hand feel, we would like customers to have more places where they can experience our work firsthand prior to purchasing it. We want them to be able to pick up a pot and examine the surface and see how it fits and feels in their hand, and see how it sits on the table…things like this. We also view wholesaling as a way of mutually supporting other small business owners and makers, and that’s equally important to us. Seeing our pots in thoughtfully curated boutiques next to the work of other talented makers is gratifying for us on so many levels.

Second, we have also been developing two full dinnerware lines and we are excited to finalize at least one of those lines this year and to make it available to our customers—there are still some key details to work out but we’re close and that’s very exciting.

Third, we are interested in continuing to work with light via luminaries and lamps and we have plans to collaborate on designs with some friends of ours. We’re very excited about. Light is so full of magic and so important in setting a mood. And as a household with a penchant for interesting one of a kind lamps, the prospect of designing our own is a creative opportunity that feels really fun and inspiring, and we hope our customers will be equally enthusiastic about the results.

To shop the collections of Dave and Risha, please visit their website Lōm Ceramics.