About Otts & Kulcha
Sam Martin makes ceramics the way a filmmaker builds worlds: with obsessive attention to detail, layered narratives, and the conviction that beauty emerges from tension. Born in New York City and now working in California, Martin moves between cinema, design, and material craft: weaving them into a singular practice.
Her vessels feel unearthed rather than made: relics from a culture that never existed, yet feel strangely familiar. Surfaces are not applied but coaxed from the clay itself, transformed by the unpredictable physics of the kiln. Cratered, burnished, or veined with improbable color, each piece refuses to sit quietly on a shelf. It insists on being noticed, handled, and remembered.
Drawing from design, astronomy, and post-industrial decay, Martin conjures objects that could belong equally to the deep past or a distant future. The result is a body of work that is modern, textured, and just a little bit brutal: artifacts that hum with contradiction. Raw yet sensual, familiar yet alien, always pushing at the edge of what clay can do.