Daily Inspiration: Meet Ted Bradley

Today we’d like to introduce you to Ted Bradley.

Hi Ted, we’d love for you to start by introducing yourself.
Ceramics was the first thing Ted Bradley knew he was passionate about, but he never considered it a professional. He first pursued careers in mechanical engineering and software that spanned more than a decade. Then six years ago he started having visions of sculptures he wanted to build. He’d wake up in the middle of the night and the sketches would pour out of him. Eventually, he came to a fork in the road in his career and decided to make a big shift. “We only get one shot at this life. Maybe it’s time for me to let go of the things I think I’m supposed to do and start doing the things I want to do.”

Bradley decided the best place start would be to build a light sculpture that had been particularly meaningful for him all of the years working his other career. It had white rings affixed to a metal spine, like the arcing ribs of a whale skeleton bleached in the sun. “The sculpture has a tension between the grace and fragility of the white rings and the strength and rigidity of the metal spine.”

Each ring takes 5 weeks and several hundred steps to make. The result is visually stunning, one-of-a-kind light sculptures that are unlike anything else.

Ted Bradley Studio now has more than 40 sculpture designs made with his hand-sculpted porcelain light rings. There’s truly nothing else like them. The sculptures are handmade in Boulder, Colorado by Bradley and his team of two artisans.

Alright, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall, and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
When he first started he had two master mold makers and a clay chemist tell him that what he was trying to do would be very difficult or impossible.

He was attempting to turn formless clay, essentially wet mud, into a geometrically perfect circle that can be married to precision metal and LED components within a few hundredths of an inch. He researched and tested dozens of techniques, had over 200 failed rings, and worked by hand through 1,300 pounds of clay over a period of more than 12 months to create the world’s first set of porcelain light rings.

Thanks – so what else should our readers know about your work and what you’re currently focused on?
I’m inspired by nature, in its infinite complexity and perfection. I love the intersection of the natural, handmade, soft, and organic with the industrial, machine-made, rigid, and geometrically perfect. The point where these two meet each other, and how they interact, is of tremendous interest to me.

You can see these themes playing out in my metal sculptures as early as 14 years old, and now more recently with the Samsara light sculpture. These two sculptures are the same, just manifested with different materials. And of course, I have a lifelong love for the circle. The perfect circle. It is the quintessential embodiment of soft and approachable meeting absolute precision in a single point of mathematical and aesthetic perfection.

We’d love to hear about any fond memories you have from when you were growing up.
My family rented a 120-year-old log cabin on a lake in Wisconsin in the summers. Each year we’d pack up our normal suburban life into a van and head for the lake. My dad had to work, so for the most part it was just our mom and us three boys. It was a pretty bold arrangement looking back at it from the lens of an adult.

I loved it there. The forests, fields, streams, and most of all the unstructured time. So much of it. We’d explore, and play games, and I would spend endless days following the caretaker of all the old cabins, watching him repair things and asking endless questions. I feel very lucky to have had that opportunity as a kid.

Pricing:

• $3200-4100 per ring depending on the sculpture.

Contact Info:

• Facebook: https://www.instagram.com/tedbradley.studio/ 

Image Credits
The Remington, Joel Reis, Ted Bradley, Studio Swag-Easton, Daniel-Villarreal, Benjamin Buren, Andrew Reiland, LTW-Design, and Marco-Ricca