When we think of ceramicists at work, we often conjure romantic visions of noble artisans wearing clay-streaked aprons and strenuously channeling their artistic magic behind a potter’s wheel. Which is mostly true, to a point, and yet — what happens once that noble artisan also has to figure out how to run a thriving, growing business? That’s the situation Forrest Lewinger found himself in last year, two years into his Workaday Handmade line and unsure of how to handle its unremitting success. When we featured Lewinger back in August of 2014, he was a recent art-school grad with a day job who’d stumbled into a ceramics line partly by accident. But since then, his collection “has been growing and getting interest from places I never imagined,” he says. “I get interior decorators from places like Salt Lake City or Minneapolis or small towns in Michigan contacting me, having no idea how they’ve found me. And then places like Barneys and Anthropolgie. I’ve spent the past year trying to figure out how to make it all work.”
Part of that has been deciding when to say no — when people request large versions of his meticulously-painted Egg Vases or Maurice Bowls, for example — while part has been attempting to make his offerings simpler without losing the quality that makes them exciting to his fans. Then part has been expanding his operation drastically to handle the increasing demand for his wares, including hiring two assistants to help him with glazing and decorating and moving, seven months ago, into a much bigger studio in Ridgewood, Queens, which is where we visited him in the fall, with photographer Paul Barbera. Lewinger gave us the scoop that day on how Workaday Handmade is changing, how his personal practice is evolving, and what new types of objects we can expect from him next. Read the story in the captions below, then head over to Barbera’s site Where They Create to see even more images from our photo shoot.
Workaday Handmade’s Forrest Lewinger in his new Brooklyn studio, “in an old charred-up industrial building right by the Western Beef and scrap-metal yards in busy Ridgewood, Queens,” he says. Lewinger and his studiomates took over a 9,000 square-foot floor of the building about 6 months ago. “I’ve cut out a little corner for myself, and it’s where I spend most of time now.”
“The main thing I do when I’m in the studio is fill up these shelves,” he says. “I get a little uncomfortable when they aren’t at full capacity, so I keep working.” For him, “working” involves nearly 30 hours a week at the potter’s wheel, throwing the painted vases and cups he’s become known for since he (officially) launched Workaday Handmade in 2013.
When he began making his own pieces, during his lunch hour as a studio assistant for another New York ceramicist, they were small vessels painted allover bright blue. But after striking out on his own, he incorporated bowls and vases covered in dots, eyes, squiggles, and grids.
Having landed those objects everywhere from Mociun to Barneys, Anthropologie, and West Elm, though, Lewinger is currently going through a transition period, in which he’s trying to both make his commercial line bigger and more efficient but also find time to experiment with new scales and functions, like the (not-quite-finished) marbled clock pictured at right.
His newest experiment with function, which he hasn’t yet released, is a series of oven-safe glazed tureens. “I was trying to see what other functions were out there,” Lewinger explains. “There’s such a huge history of cooking in ceramics — tagines, clay pots. There was also one ceramicist in the Bronx, who died in the ’60s, who made her living off of a specific kind of casserole dish, and for her it was about feeding people, and the generosity of that, which I think is a cool idea. You’re sitting here making stuff and sometimes it can feel indulgent, but if you tweak your thought process you can also think of it as something generous. Nourishing people. I love the idea that you can cook a big old chicken in something I made.”
Lewinger, like many ceramicists of his ilk, is also now playing with scale. “This is a larger vessel I was commissioned to make for a private client,” he says. “I’m looking forward to working more in this vein, though that particular world is a little mysterious to me. Art is where I came from, academically, and thought I was going to pursue, but it’s something I haven’t cultivated yet. Anyway, it was exciting to work on a larger piece that didn’t have to be functional. I’m thinking about other larger objects that can be made in ceramics, too, like stools or side tables.”
For 25-30 hours of every week, you’ll find Lewinger seated here, at his potter’s wheel. He doesn’t do much slip casting; almost all of his works are thrown. “When it’s really busy – like these past few months leading up to the holidays, which was the busiest I’ve ever been – I spend a lot of time at the wheel. I try to vary it, though. Maybe I’ll do a few days straight of throwing, then have my assistants come in and help with me with decorating and glazing.”
The decorating in particular can be incredibly meticulous, particularly for pieces like the two shown here on the left. Lately Lewinger has had to come to terms with the fact that such elaborate handwork can be at odds with the kind of growth his business is experiencing. And so he’s been trying to find ways to simplify. “Moreso than weeding things out, I’ve been thinking, what are some solid or bright-colored items I can make that are simpler, but still have the same playfulness and rigorousness in the application of glaze or the building of form.”
Lewinger sitting behind his wheel. “I’ve gotten really efficient at what I do on the wheel,” he says. “I can throw a lot in a day – so much more than I could a year ago, and with a higher success rate. If I were to scale up my studio and start slipcasting, it would slow me down at first. I’d have to slipcast a lot of molds in order to produce the same amount I can throw.”
Next to the wheel sit “an assortment of clay tools and brushes, earbuds, one empty bottle of Advil, a small bowl, sparkling water, repurposed kitchen tools, and a bag of peanut brittle. The perfect still life of a potter’s side table.”
This is only Lewinger’s second studio since he moved to New York five years ago — the first being a cramped communal space shared with two other production potters — but he’s already learned an important lesson: windows. “It turns out that knowing what time of day it is makes a huge difference,” he says. “I’ve got a little post-industrial backyard to look out at here, too.”
Out in the communal area of the studio — where Natalie Herrera of High Gloss also happens to work — are a series of kilns, one of which belongs only to Lewinger. (The studio’s other occupants include a silkscreen printer, bag maker, shoe designer, woodworker, photographer, painter, and assemblage artist.)
“All the work goes into the kiln at least a couple of times, where it’s heated to thousands of degrees,” says Lewinger. “I got mine from a nice Polish guy in New Jersey who started a non-profit arts center in an old military base. The base was built on top of an old Fredrick Law Olmstead Park, which made me realize that everybody has something they did that they leave off their resume.”
A colorful little cup that’s not currently part of the Workaday Handmade line. “The studio is always producing little one offs, tests, and half-formed ideas,” says Lewinger.
More of said items, along with some half-finished marbled clocks. “Any flat surface in the studio is an opportunity for accumulation and randomness,” Lewinger says. “Like Robert Smithson, I see opportunity in entropy. I like these corners as ways for ideas and objects to be put down, but not go away.”
Unglazed versions of Lewinger’s marbled clocks and cups — the latter of which are currently for sale in the Sight Unseen Shop — with his studio apron hanging in the background.
Workaday Handmade began as an hour of time Lewinger would devote each day, during the lunch break from his day job, to throwing all sorts of small bright-blue vessels in experimental shapes, which his friends and family began clamoring for. In the years since, though, his body of work has grown immensely, all because he couldn’t bear to part with those early experiments. “At the moment, every piece I’ve ever come up with is sitting in the studio right now,” he noted on the day we visited.
In addition to the tureens and the larger sculptural pieces, Lewinger has been toying around with the idea of making mirrors with clay frames. “I also have this idea for a dumb project I want to do called ‘early aught pots,’ a pot with a big ‘2000’ on it,” he laughs. “I want to do some really wild ones with really big dates.”
One of two big metal salvage yards across the street from his studio. The neighborhood is a Superfund site — nearby is the place where, 60 years ago, a company was routinely dumping radioactive thorium down the gutter. “Where I get most of my ideas is from my radioactivity,” Lewinger jokes.
Whatever it is, it seems to be working.
Like many creatives we’ve interviewed before, Forrest Lewinger began his Workaday Handmade ceramics label while in the employ of someone else. Having studied ceramics in college and promptly dropped it to focus on more video-based, site-specific work, the Virginia-born designer found himself a year or so ago back behind the potter’s wheel, working as a studio assistant to a ceramicist in New York City. “A lot of times, artists think of their day job as an obstructive force,” laughs Lewinger. “I started to think of it as something more generative.”
Last month, when the watch brand Mondaine asked for a peek into a day in the life of a Sight Unseen editor, I dragged our trusty photographer Paul Barbera all around the Brooklyn enclave popping in on our friends and shooting future studio visits for the site, from Workaday Handmade to Confettisystem.
To understand what it was like for Ian McDonald growing up in California’s Laguna Beach, it helps to refer back to one of the greatest television dramas of all time. Not, mind you, MTV’s reality show of the same name, but the heart-wrenching high-school football epic Friday Night Lights — McDonald’s hometown being pretty much the diametrical opposite of Dillon, Texas. “Laguna was founded as an artists’ colony,” he says. “Our school mascot, The Artist, ran around with a brush and palette and a beret. Even the football stars took art classes.” In fact, one of McDonald’s earliest run-ins with the medium that would eventually become his life’s work happened when his own sports-star brothers brought their ceramics projects home from school, where their art teacher was a local studio potter.
