At Hawk Ceramics in Kalispell, Art Casts Life in a Different Light

It can be easy on some days to think of light as it relates to wintertime in the Flathead Valley as a simple, albeit dark, fact of life. Come the end of fall, the Earth’s rotation away from the sun begins working hand-in-hand with climate and geography to sap the sun’s strength and open up a regular procession of dimly lit days. When it’s up against northwest Montana’s proprietary blend of fog, snow, inversions, rain, mist and cloud cover it can seem at times like the sun doesn’t have a chance.

Big forces are at play in this annual struggle between light and dark, but the idea of regaining control over the light in your life can feel less daunting in the company of Beth Steele, a local pilot and lighting design consultant who is the woman behind Hawk Ceramics, a small home-based Kalispell ceramics business specializing in distinctly shaped lamps and lights.

Steele describes Hawk Ceramics as a place where light and clay collide. The shapes that Steele uses can resemble mushrooms, or flowers, or even, abstractly, a person in profile. One omnidirectional lamp is designed to let the light come through a disc-shaped diffuser fitted within a ceramic circle that seems to resemble a flower angled at the sun. When Steele sells her products at local markets, people sometimes stare at them, and others keep sneaking glances as they walk by until finally they come in for a closer look.

“It kind of makes people scratch their heads and be like, ‘Wow, that’s something I haven’t seen before, which is great,” Steele said. “Part of the reason I love them is that they are fairly unique.”

Ever since her time at Flathead High School, Steele has spent a lot of time thinking about light — how it works and what it does to a space, and a life. Jokingly calling it her “lightbulb moment,” Steele recalled taking an upper-level theater class with Dave Hashley during her sophomore year of high school, and being one of the only ones in the small class who didn’t want to be an actor. Hashley put her in charge of tech for the show they were producing that semester, a series of one-act plays in the school’s black box theater. That tech job included controlling the lighting, so Steele began to familiarize herself with how lighting systems work. It was completely new to her, but she quickly became hooked. After graduation she went to college at Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Wash., where she studied theatrical lighting design and continued to work as an electrician for the college’s theater department, handling all their lighting needs.

“He absolutely changed my life trajectory by being such a supportive teacher, and also just allowing me to go explore,” Steele said of Hashley.

After college, Steele started working in what she called the electrical distribution field, before doing lighting design for an engineering company on residential and commercial projects. But she eventually started to feel a sense of burnout in the aftermath of the computer-heavy work days of the pandemic. A hands-on activity like pottery sounded appealing, so she went down to Ponderosa Pottery in Kalispell and started learning. In the meantime, Steele earned her commercial pilot’s license and began working as a part-time lighting consultant. Once it became clear pottery and ceramics was something she wanted in her life for a long time, Steele started assembling the pieces for a home studio about a year-and-a-half ago.

Light, she said, is something that people tend to take for granted. They don’t realize how big of an impact it can have on their daily lives. “When you design lighting, you’re really trying to look at reducing glare, and then beyond that, you’re looking at, how do you impact a space positively? And how do you make it functional? And then, how do you make it beautiful on top of that?”

Her work in lighting design and consultation to some extent is a matter of using her technical knowledge to match the desires of clients. But in her own home, Steele gets to use light the way she prefers. One of the first fixtures she ever made is above her kitchen table. A wooden square frame is inlaid with a smaller wooden box in the middle. Lights angled upward in the smaller box reflect off the ceiling, creating a bright, but still indirect, light from above. Hanging from the fixture by strings is an array of copper gingko leaves that glint and glow.  

What you won’t find in Steele’s personal lighting setup are recessed can lights. Calling them “the bane of my existence,” she finds them to be a harsh and oppressive way to light a space.

“One of the things in lighting design, you think about layers of light,” she said. “So you think about low light, medium light and high light.” Finding the right blend of light sources at different levels, with varying intensity and varying characteristics, can help create the right atmosphere in a given space or room.

For her Hawk Ceramics pieces, Steele plays with some of these different concepts and ideas. Some lamps have switch faces that can be used to turn them on and off and others have dimmable fixtures with LED components. As someone who grows bored quickly with too much repetition, Steele regularly tries her hand at new designs and concepts, the pieces of which sit across the room from her pottery wheel on a tall shelf housing her R&D (research and development) inventory.

One prototype uses a vase-like body, with light projected upwards through its narrowed top. Affixed over the top is a slightly angled, adjustable fan-shaped ceramic piece which gently reflects the light forward and downward. She’s still looking into how to improve the structure of the base and the top piece, as well as the light source itself.

“If I could increase diffusion, I could increase that angle, that beam angle at the top, and get a more evenly lit surface up high,” Steele said.

Among Steele’s established products is what she calls the “Toroid Torch.” Named after the mathematical term for a donut shape, the Toroid Torch has one side slightly flattened to act as a base, while opposite that, angled down from the top, is a bare bulb. Steele also makes toroidal flower vases, where stems can be inserted through the top and into the base, which visually bisects the empty interior of the shape. She’s also selling abstract ceramic “trees,” which are hollow, cone-shaped pieces with a texture that mimics the upward swirling of soft-serve ice cream. Some of the trees have small toothpick-sized holes. By placing the trees over the top of a small electric candle, Steele is able to create small points of light along the tree’s ceramic face.

Hawk Ceramics takes its name from Steele’s grandmother, Janet Hawkins Downey, who she said is one of her favorite people in the world. Still, Steele’s goal isn’t to make Hawk Ceramics the center of her life and she doesn’t want it to be a production-based pursuit. Between flying planes, ceramics, and also teaching yoga classes, her daily life has the kind of diversity of pursuits that keep her feeling refreshed.

“Trajectory-wise, I really want to keep it small and keep it creative. And within that, do more custom orders, and help people really create custom pieces for their house that they love, and that I can really put some design into and create some really nice, quality light for people.”

Hawk Ceramics products are available at Sassafras Art Co Op in Kalispell, and can be ordered online at www.hawk-ceramics.com.

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