LOAM Clay Studio

Sarah Fulford’s ceramics training, oddly enough, had more to do with learning French than how to throw a pot. “As a youth, I wanted to learn French,” she recalls. “My parents thought that immersion would be the best way to learn, so I moved to France and did my professional pottery training there, more so that I could learn the language.”

Sarah was no stranger to living and learning abroad. Having grown up in a foreign service family, she had already lived in Mexico, Argentina and Saudi Arabia. Pottery became a hobby for her, and French, another language. Her independent passion directed her towards an international career in industrial design. But Sarah kept her hobby alive in her hometown of Ottawa and decided to open her own studio, LOAM Clay Studio, in 2012. “I saw that there was an insatiable demand for pottery classes and few places to teach them,” she says. “At first, it was just for fun, but the demand never let up and, in time, it became my full-time job.”