The New Artisans
Craig Proper Home
Taylor Dickerson was burned out. The screen printing business had been good to him; it had taken him in at seventeen and taught him a craft that he loved, but it was time for something new. In a bid for a therapeutic outlet and the opportunity to clear his head, Taylor sat down to a potter's wheel at House of Clay. It turns out he didn't have far to look for his next big thing. Clay was it.
"From that first lesson, it was a fire," he beams. "I was just constantly thinking about it, constantly watching YouTube videos, thinking, how do I get the wall thickness how I want it to be? How do I throw a straight cylinder properly? And it really has not stopped since then." In a room full of students looking for a relaxing hobby, Taylor had found the object of his seemingly limitless zeal.
Averse to half measures, he soon requested to be bought out from his share of the screen printing business. With the funds, he says, he was ready to be bad. Really bad. Taking up residence in a warehouse space, Taylor set out to refine his craft. "I was just hacking away it. You're going to be bad for a long time, and I knew that. I thought, this is the time that I can take to be bad at this, so that I can figure it out. I have some money; I can live on that and just be terrible for six to nine months."
It only took five. Craig Proper Home launched as a business in June 2017. Taylor, whose middle name is Craig, now operates his home goods business out of The Silo, a collective artisan space overlooking the OKC Farmers Market. His neighbors include a luthier (a repairer of violins), a photographer, and another screen printer, The Okay See. The maker-space of sorts hums with the type of creative energy now coming to define the young Oklahoma City: messy, disjointed, collaborative, and very much alive. Dust settles in tidy drifts around Taylor's work space, the byproduct of incessant turning and re-turning to produce plates, cups, bowls, vases, and other wares that meet his exacting standards.
In the ceramicist's style debate over leaving the artist's imprint or smoothing it away, Taylor falls solidly in the smooth camp. "There's something really challenging about making something with my hands that looks as close to perfect as it can," he says, looking thoughtfully at his fingertips, still a dusty white from work. He keeps precise weights and measurements for every piece in his collection, designing it all with its form and function foremost in mind. Taylor's Scandinavian-inspired aesthetic shies away from ornamentation, allowing the work instead to rest peacefully on the laurels of its muted tones, clean lines, and sheer usefulness. Exasperated with coffee mugs that never stacked, he made his own with a nesting base and an open handle. The degree of thoughtfulness in his work is so evident that allowing the likes of a self-scripted signature to remain would detract from its simplicity.
Taylor’s devoted attention to detail paid dividends when a meeting at Commonplace Books about making a few candle vessels turned into total creative license to design a custom table service for their new instore dining concept, The Kitchen. "It was an emotional thing," Taylor reflects, "because I hadn't done anything to prove myself yet. They just trusted me. They let me go, they let me design it, and they trusted me to produce it all." The collection, numbering in the 700s of pieces, sets the stage for The Kitchen's retro concept—family style meals around a communal table nestled in the back of the bookstore—that's currently being lauded with effusive reviews.
Additional Craig Proper pieces line the retail shelves for happy diners to take home, which they do by the armful, according to co-owner Chris Castro. Gesturing to the neat stacks of Taylor's work, he explains, "This wall is intended to be a shelf of things we love; I'm never going to put anything on them that I wouldn't use myself, or that we don't use here." The partnership is a natural one. In both places, there's nothing better or nobler than an object fulfilling its purpose beautifully. "He blew it out of the water," Chris says of the upstart potter.
Taylor is modest about his success, laughing at an earlier pop-up shop at West Elm and the admittedly lower prices of some of their goods for sale. But ultimately, he says, "I think some people will choose something that is made by a person over a factory-made item, because I think that life or that character comes through…unconsciously there's something that you're connecting to about an item that's made by a person's hands." He has the wisdom of someone older than 27.
It seems this old craft is now in young—and very promising—hands.
> Craig Proper home goods can be found at craigproper.com, Commonplace Books, The Plant Shoppe, DNA Galleries, Shop Good, Plenty Mercantile, Salt and Water, and at this year's Deluxe Winter Market, set for November 24th.
