Photo: Joel Reis
Ted Bradley was a freshman in high school when he first heard his calling. The sound was so faint, he mistook it for a lark. Having only just begun adolescence, he had no reason to suspect when he signed up for ceramics as an elective that he was stepping into his life’s vocation for the first time.
“I fell in love with ceramics immediately. I took eight semesters of ceramics in high school and continued to study it in college. However, I never viewed ceramics as a profession,” begins Bradley from his studio in Boulder, Colorado. “I studied mechanical engineering in college and began a career in engineering. Once I reached my thirties, I began to wonder if that was what I truly wanted to do with my life. I decided that if I could do anything, I would get back into ceramics.”
Ted Bradley Studio, founded in November 2019, gave Ted the COVID year to figure out the logistics of mixing his passion for sculptural ceramics with his knowledge of art, engineering, design and business. Six years later, Ted’s ceramics are more than a passion. Today, his studio produces hand-made porcelain and LED light sculptures that elegantly enhance living spaces and enliven office building atriums, conference rooms and restaurants.
“Ceramics involves working with mud. Soft clay is formed, shaped, dried and then fired. In the kiln, the dry mud particles melt and fuse, forming a baked stone,” says Bradley of techniques handed down through most of human history. “Like most people, for me it began because it’s a fun and rewarding process. However, clay is also incredibly complex, challenging and unforgiving to work with. Clay shrinks about 18 percent from forming to fired, which causes immense internal stresses that can easily lead to cracking without precise controls and processes. As a medium, this material is soft, organic, chaotic and unpredictable. Clay has a memory. Even a small bend or dent during the forming process will become a flaw in the finished product.”
Envisioning a signature ceramic lighting element, Bradley turned to one of the world’s most cherished forms, the ring.
“The first collection I created was our ring collection. The source of light is an LED strip covered by a light diffusing lens that sits within a porcelain ring.” he continues. “Porcelain is a highly refined version of clay originally developed in China thousands of years ago. If you fire it hot enough, it becomes transparent, allowing the ring to emit a soft, special light. We use clay called Kaolin. Sourced from New Zealand, Kaolin produces what is considered the finest, brightest white porcelain in the world.”
After two master molders told him it would be impossible to make geometrically perfect rings from porcelain, Bradley embarked on a year of trial-and-error engineering to perfect his first porcelain light ring. Working through 1,400 pounds of clay, he developed a process of more than 200 steps, which takes three weeks to produce a single perfect ring. Inside each ring, a 95+ CRI (Color Rendering Index) LED light strip, covered by a diffuser, reveals colors with near-perfect accuracy, making a room’s objects and art look truly vibrant.
Bradley combines sets of rings to assemble light sculptures that hang in homes, hotels, offices and restaurants worldwide. Inlaid with more than a thousand warm, dimmable LEDs and accented by fine hand-polished and patinaed metalwork, clusters of rings conspire in customizable configurations. Bradley has developed a collection of assemblies inspired by the organic chaos of nature; Bearing Fruit, Vine, Nest and Constellation, to name a few.
“The sculptural component comes from the juxtaposition of porcelain filled with soft light, accompanied by the luxurious seriousness of fine metalwork in space-pleasing configurations,” says Bradley of the finished product.
So far, 95 percent of the studio’s sales have gone through interior designers. Trained in mechanical engineering, Bradley understands the delicate alchemy that goes into designing the spaces his lights adorn. Offering an abundance of options in refined materials and lighting strips is imperative to meet the end-user expectations of a bespoke experience.
“We can assemble the ring sculptures with any of many different light temperatures. We’re making bright and cool whites and warm dim. Presently, Ketra is really blowing up,” continues Bradley, of a willingness to keep pace with trends in lighting while insisting on the highest quality materials and the most refined craftsmanship.
“Sadly, in high-end design, there are a lot of knockoffs. Once, when I discovered a virtual replica of our ring lights online, I was devastated. They looked great on Instagram and sold for a price I can’t compete with. When I had the chance to see the exact piece in a showroom, my concern vanished because in person, because it was clear they were cheap knockoffs made from plastic. Our sculpture’s craftsmanship, premium materials, and quality of the light experience must be experienced in person to understand.”
Bradley has partnerships with a collection of premium showrooms reaching from Seattle, Washington to Torino, Italy, with London and many major American cities in between. He also encourages interior designers, lighting designers and lighting suppliers to schedule visits to the Boulder studio.
“People love to talk about the hand-made, custom craftsmanship, and quality, but they still want to pay overseas factory-made prices. This shop can’t exist producing 20 pieces a month,” informs Bradley of the logistics of running a manufacturing process in a studio setting. “Our first fully assembled custom ring sculptures sold for $25,000 to $75,000. With our new Dome light, we’ve developed an equally beautiful lighting element that can sell at a more mainstream price of about $3,000 per sculpture.”
A familiar form in lighting for decades, in Bradley’s hands, the simple dome takes on a dynamic elegance through a collection of nine distinct styles. Using a series of cascading arms, mobiles balancing between two and nine connected domes can be customized to any space. Swag pendants hang from sweeping, finely braided metal cording, offering a sympathetic contrast to spaces defined by right angles. Available in 26 unique finish options and adorned by brass, bronze or nickel metalwork that can be antiqued, bronzed or blackened, the option to customize without blowing the budget will thrill designers.
“The goal was to create a piece that looks truly different and casts a quality of light that’s unsurpassed,” says Bradley. His new light sculptures are designed to appeal to an underserved market, technology design and system integrators. “With the Domes, users will never see the bulb. Instead, we’re using a COB LED that evenly bounces light off the inside of the dome.”
A Chip on Board (COB) LED is an advanced lighting technology that involves integrating multiple LED Chips within a single source to produce a highly uniform light output. This allows for high lumen density and a continuous line of light in a synchronized, energy-efficient lighting element.
“Using this COB is what enables the Domes to be at the forefront of Ketra integration,” shares Bradley. Sold through professional systems integrators, Ketra is the ultra-premium in today’s architectural and wellness-focused lighting. Ketra’s ability to render approximately 16.7 million colors provides dynamic lighting that mimics natural sunlight by shifting color temperature and intensity throughout the day. “We’re interested in building strong relationships with lighting designers and technology design firms. My background is in engineering, so we’re tech fluid.”
Like porcelain, all the metalwork adorning each light sculpture begins as raw materials shaped by artisanal hands in Ted Bradley Studio.
“Between the configurations, sizes, porcelain finishes, and metalwork combinations, there are more than 100,000 possibilities in the Dome line,” says Bradley. His new product line isn’t less expensive because of lower-quality porcelain or cheaper LEDs. It’s because he thought through the configuration of production and developed a more efficient repeatable process. “Using molds and a precise process, making a single porcelain ring takes four hours, making it a literal sculptural piece of art. Today, we can make eight porcelain Domes in about 20 minutes. The Domes require the same craftsmanship and premium Kaolin porcelain and incorporate a significantly more sophisticated light source than the rings. Ultimately, what I want to express is that Ted Bradley Studio is using mud and light to surprise and delight.”
