Meet Laura Holmes McCarthy | Ceramist & Creative Director

We had the good fortune of connecting with Laura Holmes McCarthy and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Laura, what was your thought process behind starting your own business?
I’ve worked for ad agencies and startups as a writer and creative director for over 15 years now. I started taking ceramics classes in 2017 after abruptly deciding to leave a particularly bad job situation. This was half an impulse inspired by the thought of “I need something to fill my time now that I’ll never work again” (the self-doubt is very real, ha) and half by wanting to return to making art that engaged my hands and my body in a more tactile, immediate way after having set aside art making for nearly a decade because of the 60+ hour weeks that agency life often required. I ended up falling in love with it.

Working in advertising, there’s a lot of pressure to have a “side hustle,” to have some kind of additional business or creative outlet that you monetize outside of your day job. At the jobs I would end up having when I did in fact end up working again (it took about three days to pick up some freelance, and six months to commit to a job I actually wanted to stay in long-term), people would frequently ask “do you sell your stuff?” or “why don’t you have a shop yet”? I honestly wasn’t in a rush. I liked having this thing that was just for me with no financial pressure around it.

That said, working in advertising, there’s a phrase you hear a lot: “test and learn.” This is about making small investments in low-stakes ads and media buys to get a signal about what customers are responding to, so that you can make better informed decisions when it’s time to invest more. When I did decide to start selling my work in 2020, I took a bit of a “test and learn” approach to the ins-and-outs of running my own art business, too. I started with doing fundraiser sales on Instagram during the pandemic. Then, I put a few listings on an Etsy site. I got invaluable feedback on things like shipping and product quality from the small circle of friends and friends-of-friends who bought my work. I played with pricing structures and thought about stuff like: Do I charge more for the item so that I can offer free shipping or should I just be transparent about shipping cost? Do I really want to mess with offering local delivery (ie, shlepping heavy, fragile boxes around a 5 mile radius in my Kia). Once I was comfortable, I built out my Shopify site. I played around with having a “brand” vs. selling things under my name in a way more in line with how an artist would approach it and decided–both of these approaches have value within different venues. I experiment a lot with what I make, continue to try to figure out the magic formula for unlocking the secret to perfect pricing. I’ve engaged a wide range of vendors and partners for selling the work–from local shops to design galleries and tabling at markets–and figured out more about what I do and don’t like about each.

The most important learning from all of it so far is that the business has to align with my values. I’m still not making a profit from this, I still have my full time job, and I feel really comfortable with that for now. I’ve honored my time and energy by not engaging in things that don’t feel right, and learned the importance of generosity in building relationships with people in the small business ecosystem. My favorite part of my business has been doing benefit sales for organizations whose work I appreciate–local charities that support food equity, cat rescues, abortion funds, things like that. Again, I’m testing and learning about what being a “small business owner” means to me, and what it means for it to be something that I want to continue to engage in.

Alright, so let’s move onto what keeps you busy professionally?
I’m a sort-of-self-taught but mostly community-taught ceramist making a mix of functional art and purely functional objects in Wappingers Falls, NY. My education lacks the letters “MFA” but does include the wisdom and guidance of a number of teachers and friends in studios throughout NYC and the Hudson Valley.

My work explores emotional connectivity through functional objects, and my practice is informed by my personal history–a career in digital media, a family tradition of craft, and recovery from complicated grief. These seem like disparate subjects, and probably a little removed from what’s basically making pottery, but the place where they intersect is what largely informs my work.

First, as it pertains to my career: Working in the ad world for a decade and a half means I’ve watched as the things we sell (and the way we sell them) has become largely ephemeral. Brands talk more and more about wanting to create “frictionless” experiences, ie reduce the barriers to purchase by making the purchase experience streamlined and almost unnoticeable–think every time you’ve impulse bought something with a double click on your phone while barely mentally registering the transaction. Even the ads we make–which used to be printed or kept on a disc somewhere–are now often relegated to disposable “content” that just… disappears into the digital void once it stops being effective. So basically, I spend a lot of time thinking about how much we as humans are increasingly physically disengaged with the world around us. This causes me to not only want to make tactile objects, but often to make them purposefully imperfect or even difficult to use. I want to force people to pay attention to the things they surround themselves with again, because I think this inspires greater appreciation for not just the objects, but the people who make them. This part of my practice is driven by a desire for a return to greater cultural empathy.

Second, as it pertains to family traditions and grief: My 20s were largely defined by the loss of the three most important people in my life to cancer. My father died from CLL in 2003 at age 52 when I was 20. My best friend and bandmate died as a result of melanoma when we were both 26 in 2008. My mother died from lung cancer in 2012 at age 61 when I was 29. This was a pretty brutal way to start my early adulthood, and it left me struggling with defining my own sense of self for a long time. Picking art back up in my 30s through ceramics was a bit of a return to self–a love of art I had largely left behind in childhood while still feeling like an artist somewhere deep down.

Within the desire to create work that very purposefully isn’t frictionless and has longevity over time, is also a desire to document the sort of ineffable energy that we as humans have, borne from the personal experience of not realizing how much of my loved ones would disappear with their deaths. I have photos, and I have some recordings of some of their voices, but it’s much harder to keep the way those people make you feel, the way they fill out your own personal history and sense of self. I think craft traditions do the best job of this though. My mother was a quilter, painter, and late-night-plate-smashing mosaic enthusiast, and I can feel her in those artifacts in a way I can’t feel her anywhere else. To this end, many of my art pieces are entirely improvised–creating a bit of a document of my own energy at the time of making. Others are tapping into memories through motifs and craft-inspired techniques–relief of rock collections, or my mother’s favorite tulips, or a full bloom of plant life encircling a the absence formed inside a vessel with a hole punched through the middle. These are all ways of telling stories through time and generations.

If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
I live in the Hudson Valley in New York State and it is full of gems because it is full of creative people. Here are some of my favorites:

Food: For something low-key (which is my speed about 90% of the time), I’d take them to the Hog, Wagon Wheel Pizza, or Obercreek Brewery in the Village of Wappingers Falls. A trip to the teaching restaurants at CIA is always fun, too. Finally, you can’t go to the Hudson Valley in the Summer without getting ice cream, so a special shout out goes to the Village Creamery, with the delightful cow painting and lovely people.

For Recreation: Art and galleries–Storm King and DIA Beacon, but also the world class galleries at Vassar and Bard.

For retail fashion: There’s always a warm welcome and special things to be found at Nikki Chasin in Hudson, Kaight in Beacon, and Ruinous Revived in Wappingers Falls.

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
I have a couple of friends who I came up with in the ad agency world, who have also subsequently gone on to start businesses that reflect their passions and values–Jillian Dresser, the founder of From Scratch, and Kelly Wright, the founder of Yuns.

Jillian is an art director and creative director, and was my partner in youthful 20-something snark and cynicism, until one day we found ourselves in an earnestly adorable small town and kind of looked at each other and basically said “I think I’m tired of hating everything” to each other. The love of gardening she’s grown over time is so genuine and embodied and it shows in the beauty of her output. She puts care into everything she does.

Kelly is the brilliant cool strategist we shared an office with who was impossible not to like. I remember her talking about wanting to open her own hardware store for a long time, which is the kind of idea that advertising people love to be skeptical of because it’s a simple, unfussy idea that addresses an actual need vs. say, another app for “disrupting” (ie ruining) something (sorry, there’s the snark coming through). The reality of what she’s built with Yuns is somehow so much more than “just a hardware store” and yet it is beautiful because it is just that–it’s well curated, honors and celebrates well crafted, useful things that will last you a long time, and rich with subject matter knowledge and passion. Her voice is so clear in it–her deep love of the subject and her personal history inform every choice in a way that manages to feel elevated yet accessible.

Both of these businesses are great because they’re such clear vectors for each person’s values, and they’re building them intentionally and with care.

Website: http://lhmcstudio.com

Instagram: @lhmcstudio

Image Credits
Portrait photo taken by Sean McCarthy