Spotlight: Foxwares Ceramics

Lindsey and Dimitar Wohlgemuth unconsciously mirror each other as the three of us chat in their kitchen. Dimitar slouches back against the kitchen counter while Lindsey leans forward across the kitchen table. They serve me thick, African coffee and a chocolate and walnut cake made by Dimitar’s Romanian grandfather. They’ve been married for two years now, and it’s clear that they’ve fully settled into their cozy house in central Austin. On every wall, there are paintings by Lindsey’s friends, shelves stacked with her ceramics. New Zealand’s psychedelic pop musician, Connan Mockasin, plays over Dimitar’s stereo in the other room.

Lindsey is the ceramicist who makes the gorgeous ice cream bowls we sell through our website and scoop shops. We first met Lindsey through Mockingbird Domestics, situated comfortably nearby our south Lamar location, and they sell her bowls and other works as well. Though she first began to work with ceramics in college, she first started going to craft shows under her business name, Foxwares, just three years ago.

Lindsey has run Foxwares mostly by herself with support from Dimitar for several years now, but it wasn’t until her thirtieth birthday that she took the leap into making ceramics her full-time job. Now, Dimitar is finishing up just one more project as a web designer before also coming on full-time. Though for the past several years she has mainly worked making tiles, bowls, and pots, Lindsey says that in the future, she’d like to focus even more on plates and dishes for the dining room.

“I love the dinnerware,” Lindsey says, “I love the idea that what I’m making will be the dish that another person eats off of. There’s something very intimate about that.”

A native-Austinite herself, Lindsey comes from a line of Texas craftspeople. Her great-grandmother was a porcelain painter whose work Lindsey and her sister used as playroom tea sets growing up. Her grandfather was a woodworker in Dimmitt, Texas, and Lindsey has strong memories of being in her grandfather’s workshop growing up, of sweeping the sawdust up off the floor. He had a sign outside that read ‘Workshop’ on one side and ‘Studio’ on the other that he could switch depending on if he felt more like an artist or a tradesman that day. In Lindsey’s work, there is no such divide.

Despite her heritage, Lindsey found ceramics almost by accident. As a UT student getting her BFA in painting, Lindsey was required to take some kind of sculpture class. She fulfilled that requirement with a ceramics class and swiftly fell head over heels for the form. After college, she saved up enough money working at a flower shop to buy herself a throwing wheel and a small kiln.

In the small studio that might have been a porch behind their house, Lindsey shows me with care the many things that she is working on. She demonstrates to me how she must spin her wheel as she paints glaze onto the lip of a bowl to get the line just right. She opens up her kiln to show me bowls ready to be fired. When she runs out of glaze, she mixes more, laughing as she uses an immersion blender that would usually be found in a kitchen to get the components of her glaze just right. Lindsey tells me that, in many ways, ceramics and cooking are one and the same. Both can be made into a science, but really it’s just about feel. She tells me this as she demonstrates the way she can test the consistency of her glaze by seeing how it runs off her fingertip.

Mockingbird Domestics and Lindsey have had a relationship for a long time now. They were her first wholesale client as she was beginning to expand her work under the Foxwares label, and it was through them that we were able to meet Lindsey and commission her to make these bowls that we so deeply love.