No. 01 — how the table got set
it started with a mug that photographed badly.
A friend of mine throws pots. Her glazes are the kind you want to run a thumb across — speckled, pooled, a little green where they break over the rim. Her listing photos made all of it look like grey plastic. So I borrowed one mug, set it on a card table next to a window, and waited for the light to come in sideways.
That afternoon photo sold the mug. Then her studio-mate asked if I’d try her candles, and a leatherworker down the hall asked about wallets, and at some point the card table stopped getting folded away at night.
I don’t make your work look expensive. I make it look like itself, on its best afternoon.
Fennel Row is still small on purpose. One room in Brooklyn, one window, and shelves of surfaces I’ve collected because a particular glaze or grain needed them. The name comes from the window box under that first window — a scraggly row of fennel the afternoon light always reached before anything else.
Most of the makers I shoot for never visit. They ship a box, or they sit at their own bench on a video call and tell me to nudge the spoon a little to the left. Either way, every box gets the attention I gave that first mug: one piece at a time, lit until the making shows.
the one behind the camera, Fennel Row