The Temple in Portsmouth
A former software developer taught himself the wheel in a single season and built DEEP BLACK, a ceramic studio of inky glazes, Venetian artichokes and constellations hidden in plain sight.
Behind a house in Portsmouth, Virginia, there is a detached studio of some nine hundred square feet. Sherród Faulks calls it Temple. He bought the house in November 2020 largely for the sake of that building, and it is there, among the kilns and the glaze buckets, that DEEP BLACK takes form.
A lifetime of other skills
Faulks came to clay late and from an unlikely direction. As a boy he taught himself electronics from books, and by fifth grade he was writing code. He studied Japanese and printmaking at William and Mary, spent a semester studying photography at Parsons, then left to start a software company. Later came a food media venture, with recipes, podcasts, tours and a farmers market stall.
Pottery began in 2019, in a community studio class he found too slow. He taught himself the rest on the wheel. "It was the first time in life I could make the thing I wanted to have," he told Coastal Virginia Magazine. DEEP BLACK launched in March 2020, describing itself as a modern, minimal ceramic studio that bridges art, design and craft.
Failure, fired
He is unsentimental about the medium. "Ceramics is a practice of failure," he told Business of Home, and his process seems built to absorb it. Designs begin as sketches on an iPad. He calls himself a student of the Bauhaus and uses glaze only where color improves a form. His glazes are his own: Midnight, a glossy, inky blue; Lagoon, a matte phthalo green; and Deep Lagoon, a blue-green ombré that turns dark copper in low light.
The current collection reveals the range of his references. The Cardo vases, his first fully hand-built family, take their shape from the ornamental artichokes he saw around Venice, and are made in two halves joined, as the studio puts it, by the slap of wood on clay. In the Cardo Constellation Vase, the holes that hold each stem are arranged in the pattern of Scorpius.
The persistence of objects
The most ambitious work is unapologetically sculptural. The Vase of Persistence, thrown on the wheel in sections and glazed in Midnight, carries a hawk painted in negative with wax resist. A companion wall piece bears the line "Until death, all defeat is psychological."
Many pieces are one of a kind and sell quickly. The Cardo vases begin at $69 for the bud vase and $129 for the full form. They are, as Faulks intends, objects at several prices for a single purpose: to make an ordinary table look as though someone had thought very carefully about it.
