Meet Jennie Wainer & Sam Watkins

We had the good fortune of connecting with Jennie Wainer & Sam Watkins and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Jennie Wainer & Sam Watkins, what was your thought process behind starting your own business?
First and foremost, an introduction Jennie here, hello 🙂

We are Sam and Jennie of Desert Fox Ceramics! Sam is a generational potter who started throwing when he was fifteen years old, with a focus on making pieces that are both aesthetically pleasing and functional. He has worked at three pottery studios across the country since graduating college. I am a self-taught creative who started drawing and painting at a young age, with a focus on exploration of colors and textures to depict nature. We went to college together and reconnected in 2021, dating long distance between Utah and Colorado. In our free time, we summit mountains, climb cliffs, camp under the stars, and roam wild landscapes with our adventure pup Cahya.

I visited Sam at the pottery studio in Colorado in the early spring of 2022, where I carved and painted some landscapes on a few terracotta mugs that he had thrown earlier that day. He visited me the next month in Utah for a camping and climbing trip and brought the completed mugs. They came out great! On our drive to Maple Canyon, we started talking about what it would look like to be serious about a pottery collaboration. Living in two different states at the time, we knew it wouldn’t be easy. But our shared love for the land and for life together solidified our desire to create pieces that would pull from both of our strengths, our experiences, and our love for nature. We wanted to create pottery that would bring the land we love to life.

At the time, I was was living in the Utah desert working with a wilderness therapy company, and Sam called me his desert fox. Thus, on a random backroad heading for adventure, Desert Fox Ceramics was born.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
SAM: I think one of the things that sets us apart from other potters is that we have a lot of variety when it comes to our pieces. Often, artists have a specific color scheme or shape or theme that they follow, which is awesome. And, we don’t really do that. When we go to sales, our table is always a little chaotic.. But in a good way 🙂 We usually have at least four different clay bodies, three types of firings, and a vast number of underglaze and glaze combinations. In my experience, most potters use around five to ten glazes on their work. Meanwhile, we have over thirty glazes represented on the pieces we have in stock right now. Because making the glazes at my studio is one of my main responsibilities, I am very excited and proud that this translates over to Desert Fox Ceramics, especially in how we pair glazes together. Another thing that I am excited about is the potential to work with restaurants and other small local businesses in the future. Specifically, I hope to collaborate with a ramen restaurant, as our ramen bowls are one of my favorite forms to throw. One of the biggest challenges that any potter faces is the unpredictability of the kiln. You can fire a glaze combination that looks fantastic, only for it to look rather different and potentially mediocre in the same kiln’s next firing. I have learned that being unattached to our pieces is a necessary part of the process. Lastly, the one thing that I want the world to know about Desert Fox is that we love collaborating with people. We obviously enjoy having creative ideas of our own. And, we are always thrilled and honored when folks come to us with a vision and trust us to make it come to life.

JENNIE: Similar to Sam, I think that one of the things that sets us apart from other potters is that no two of our pieces look the same. Yes, sure, one can argue that this is the case with a ton of potters. But I think that A) production pottery is a huge part of the world today where pieces are exactly the same form and exactly the same color and B) many potters I have met are striving to make a perfect set of identical mugs. I don’t think we do that. Sam throws our pieces, and he is wildly consistent in his forms. Then he passes them along to me, and I do the carving and the painting, and I could care less if each of my mountains, for example, look the same across pieces in a set. It’s more about the energy that ties the pieces together and less about them being exact replicas. I am excited about and proud of each line carved into each piece because I can truly say that the piece we make for you is one of a kind. Additionally, I am excited about the potential to bring more meaning to pieces. Someday, I would love to partner with an organization that supports and advocates for big and beautiful things – like wildlife conservation or wilderness therapy or bringing art to marginalized communities. I think a challenge for me in all of this is that I am so so bad at not getting attached to pieces!!!!! I have such high hopes, and I’m always devastated when they don’t turn out like I imagined. It’s something I’m working on that Sam has to help me with 🙂 Lastly, the one thing that I want the world to know about Desert Fox Ceramics is how much work goes into every piece. Unless you’re a potter, I think that folks struggle to understand how much time it takes to throw, hand-build, trim, stamp, handle, carve, bisque, underglaze, glaze, fire, sand, market, and sell a piece of pottery. The amount of hard work, intentionality, and love that goes into Desert Fox is massive, and it means a lot when this is acknowledged and appreciated.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
We live right in Boulder, Colorado, and one of our favorite things to do is to… get out of Boulder! Ha, partially kidding.

While in town, we enjoy grabbing food at Sherpas, Busaba Thai, and Korea House. And we love getting drinks at the Bitter Bar, Jungle, and the Rayback! We climb in Boulder Canyon and Eldorado Canyon State Park, play in Grass Roots Ultimate leagues, and hike on the Boulder Open Space and Mountain Park trails. We love going to the in-town farmer’s markets, bringing our dog to Coot Lake to swim, and identifying trees and flowers on our neighborhood walks.

Otherwise, we are leaving town to adventure as much as possible. Nearby, we love taking our paddle boards to alpine lakes, snowshoeing up by Rock Mountain National Park, backpacking on the Colorado Trail and in the Indian Peaks wilderness, and going to concerts at Red Rocks, Fiddler’s Green, and beyond. Often, we take a few days and drive down to the Utah desert to hike, canyoneer, climb, and honestly just be little desert lizards soaking up the sun.

Shoutout is all about shouting out others who you feel deserve additional recognition and exposure. Who would you like to shoutout?
Shoutout to our friends and family who were wildly supportive when we started this endeavor. I think we made fifty terracotta landscape mugs that first round? And they were scooped up immediately by the people closest to us. Over the past few years, these lovely humans continue to share our work with their people (growing our reach), ask for custom commissioned pieces (expanding our creativity), and show up for our business in person and virtually (bolstering our confidence).

Shoutout to Groundworks Art Lab in Boulder, Colorado where Sam started as a member, became a teacher and studio technician, and is now the Assistant Manager for the ceramics department. Because we don’t have our own home studio (yet!), this space has been vital to our production process. And, the community is wonderful as well!

And shoutout to the Utah desert where Jennie spent two and a half years working with at risk-adolescents and immersing herself fully in that landscape for 8 days at a time. Most of her inspiration comes from this wild landscape, and it is where she re-found her love for creating art.

Website: https://desertfoxceramics.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/desert.fox.ceramics/