BIG BIG PUN & TAY TAY
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BIG BIG PUN & TAY TAY 〰️
Our Team
Our Team
BIG BIG PUN & TAY TAY
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BIG BIG PUN & TAY TAY 〰️
Big Big Pun
BBP brings new meaning to dirty old lady.
BIG BIG PUN (MFA*)
FOUNDER
Big Big Pun has an MFA, which she earned the traditional way — by sitting through critiques where deeply uninspired people with excellent eyewear and questionable breath suggested her work might benefit from words usually reserved for feminine hygiene ads: cleaner, lighter, more controlled.
At one particularly low point, someone said “edit,” followed closely by “minimalism” and “restraint,” which felt less like feedback and more like a medical diagnosis. She learned everything she needed to learn. History. Proportion. Scale. And how to be politely told she was doing too much… by people doing very little.
Where most people finish, she starts getting interested. She studied pots that behaved so well they practically tucked themselves in at night — polite, balanced, deeply committed to not causing a scene.
Meanwhile, her feedback consistently circled one word: unresolved — academic code for this doesn’t fit in my brain, and that rarely ends well for you.
It did not stop her.
It did the opposite.
It lit her up. Gassed her up. Sent her straight back into the studio to push harder, further, and just past the point where things start to get uncomfortable — which, coincidentally, is where the good stuff lives.
Because somewhere between a very confident opinion and a glaze bucket some demon left the lid off of, she realized something important: you’re working with dirt. Not polite dirt. Not well-behaved dirt. Dirt that expands, collapses, blisters, crawls, cracks, fuses itself permanently to things you care about, and occasionally produces an object so beautiful it feels like it’s mocking you personally.
That’s not failure.
That’s participation.
That’s the light that got left on.
Big Big Pun stopped trying to make clay behave and started treating it like a collaborator with boundary issues.
Now she runs her studio accordingly. She’s not alone in this.
The kiln isn’t a tool — it’s a weather pattern.
Cone 6 is the optimistic dog — mostly sunny with a 100% chance of being wrong.
Cone 10 is the other dog — severe weather advisory, property damage likely, no one is safe.
Bisque is the cat — refusing to evacuate and somehow listed as the cause of the storm.
Which explains everything.
Function is optional.
Mediocrity is not.
Some pieces hold water.
Some hold fruit.
Some hold the kind of tension you usually associate with family holidays.
People encounter her work and do that thing where they lean in, squint slightly, and ask, “Is this supposed to do that?” — which is the correct question and SINGLES the wrong buyer.
Because the real answer is:
it did that —
and she didn’t stop it.
That’s Big Big Pun in a nutshell.
Where most people pull back, she adds one more layer.
Where most people fix, she breaks.
Where most people decide it’s gone too far, she pushes.
The MFA taught her how to make things that make sense.
The kiln taught her how to make things that matter.
And Big Big Pun, to her credit, chose to matter.
*MFA = Master of FUCKING Around
Big Big Pun
age 8 — already catching things she probably shouldn’t and refusing to let go.
TAY TAY (a.k.a. Taymor Buford Taylor III)
FOUNDER
Taymor Buford Taylor III was born into the kind of La Jolla family where money doesn’t talk — it hovers, judges, occasionally arriving in a Himalaya Birkin never touched by human flesh. The kind of rarified socialite stratosphere where children are considered… unfortunate accessories. His mother acquired her wealth the old-fashioned way: by marrying it on its last gasp and keeping it alive — through sheer surgical intervention and moral flexibility. A former socialite with lips as inflated as her expectations, she held an unaccredited PhD in Personal Leverage. She spent her days in Bob Mackie and her nights in a slow parade of social climbers without souls or ladders, reminding the household who, exactly, had sacrificed the most (it was always her, and somehow also everyone else’s fault).
Maternal presence, when it occurred, came through a Nutone in-home intercom system — a disembodied voice issuing directives from somewhere behind electric shades. Love arrived as instruction. Affection was scheduled upon performance. Eye contact was considered excessive.
TINA LOUISE TAYLOR (a.k.a. MUMMY)
Head of Shipping & Strategic Appearances
“Handled.”
Tina Louise Taylor was named — with great optimism and limited foresight — after the movie star on Gilligan’s Island, by parents who left Queens in search of a better life and, more specifically, a better outcome. She achieved both.
She married well. Exceptionally well. The kind of marriage that comes with estates, jets with G’s on their tails, obligations, and an allowance to match. When her husband passed — a 30-year age gap does tend to resolve itself — he left her a considerable inheritance and, more importantly, a position. Tina has spent the years since curating both, with named buildings, awards, carefully documented brushes with the celebrated, and acrylic plaques to prove it.
There were boards. Many boards.
Not all of them… essential.
She has been, at various points, affiliated with the La Jolla Cultural Advancement Circle, the Pacific Decorative Arts Council, and the Friends of the Getty (Auxiliary Advisory Tier). There were also quieter associations — the Viktor Wynd Museum of Curiosities in London, the Icelandic Phallological Museum (where her role remains diplomatically undefined), and a brief but well-photographed involvement with an acquisition conversation adjacent to Gauguin’s Arii Matamoe (The Royal End), which she references with confidence and minimal detail.
Her contributions were described as “influential,” though rarely specified.
She understood exchange — social, financial, positional — and moved accordingly.
Names were currency. She spent them freely.
She rarely paid full price for anything, including relationships.
There is, beneath all of this, a small and carefully managed sense that something may not have gone entirely right. It presents occasionally. Briefly. Then disappears.
When Tay Tay’s logistical situation became… apparent, Tina agreed to help. Not directly. Not emotionally. But structurally. One suspects a professional recommendation was involved. Indonesia has come up.
She assumed responsibility for shipping. And, quietly, a form of maternal reconciliation.
No announcement. No discussion. Just a shift.
Boxes began arriving intact. Labels aligned. Fragile items treated as if they were, in fact, fragile. Processes appeared. Standards followed. Errors diminished. It was unsettling.
She runs the shipping operation remotely from La Jolla, in a room adjacent to what she refers to as the “staff lounge,” though the staff itself is rarely mentioned. Items are collected from the studio and transported — carbon footprint undisclosed — to her for final handling. They leave better than they arrived.
She moves through this system with quiet authority, correcting what needs correcting, ignoring what cannot be salvaged. She does not rush. She does not explain. She does not repeat herself.
Tina maintains a level of composure that suggests either discipline or chemistry. It’s considered impolite to ask which.
Packages go out on time now.
No one has thanked her.
She has not required it.
Maternal presence, when it occurred, came through a Nutone in-home intercom system — a disembodied voice issuing directives from somewhere behind electric shades. Love arrived as instruction. Affection was scheduled upon performance. Eye contact was considered excessive.
So he built his own world.
While his mother curated perfection — white upholstery, Gucci tableware, Versace place settings, lighting calibrated within an inch of its life — Tay Tay discovered dirt. Not metaphorically. Literally. Clay, slip, dust, glaze. A parallel universe that did not care about linen choices or guest lists. A place where things could be formed, distorted, destroyed, and — most importantly — left out in full view without a designer label attached.
At first, it was sabotage.
Small, deliberate acts of aesthetic terrorism. A pinch pot here. A crooked vase there. Objects appearing like rabbits breeding where they absolutely did not belong — design violations of the interior kind. Little monuments to disorder quietly infiltrating a life built on control. It was deeply satisfying.
But something shifted.
What started as rebellion turned into fluency. What started as mess became a message. The chaos stopped being a reaction and became a practice.
He got good. Annoyingly good.
Somewhere between a poorly timed glaze experiment and a complete disregard for consequence, Tay Tay realized he wasn’t just ruining picture-perfect personas — he was making things that held their own weight. Things that might actually belong somewhere. Things that didn’t ask permission. Things that, against all odds, worked. He didn’t need permission either.
Then he met Big Big Pun.
And for the first time, someone didn’t try to clean it up. Someone met him with a full Ozark embrace — physical, emotional, and deeply unconditional.
They didn’t correct him.
They didn’t suggest restraint.
They didn’t reach for a towel, a vowel, or an adjective.
They added another layer.
The rest is, technically, history. But more accurately, it’s ongoing.
Tay Tay still doesn’t travel well. Still resists containment. Still prefers things slightly off, slightly wrong, and fully committed — with a degree of unresolved mischief and rebellion that refuses to settle.
But now there’s structure to the chaos.
Or at least… a shared understanding of it.
Which is close enough.
Tay Tay, age 9 — summering, not sweating. Last time he was clean… spiritually, financially, and legally.
THE CREW
TINA TAYLOR
TINA, AGE 22 — for the 30th consecutive year, after ‘just a little work,’ insists this is the earliest photo ever taken.
🐕 CONE 6
Head of False Confidence
“Everything’s going great. It’s not. But let’s fire it anyway.”
Cone 6 arrived with the kind of confidence usually reserved for people who have never checked the weather and see no reason to start now. He was found behind a community center, inserting himself into conversations he didn’t understand, nodding at the wrong moments, waiting for validation that never quite arrived.
For a while, he followed anyone who looked like they might drop something. Not out of instinct. Out of belief.
Positioning himself directly beneath potential outcomes.
He provides failure support. Delivers optimism in the form of licks. And despite a long, well-documented history of being in the wrong place at exactly the wrong time, he remains — improbably — essential.
Not catastrophically wrong.
Just consistently enough that patterns begin to form.
No one corrects him anymore.
It feels important that someone in the room still believes everything will turn out fine — even as everyone else quietly adjusts expectations and moves the good pieces out of reach.
🐕 CONE 10
Director of Consequences
“Calm. Patient. Not entirely transparent.”
Cone 10 came from a shelter — though “came from” suggests a level of consent that was never fully established. We were there to deliver a ceramic piece for the lobby when he approached us with a certainty that made the outcome feel pre-decided.
There wasn’t a conversation.
There was a correction.
His superpower is cuddling. Not casual affection — deliberate, stabilizing contact. The kind that slows a room down and makes you reconsider what just happened.
He carries himself with a calmness that feels less like temperament and more like policy. The kind most ceramic artists spend years trying to develop, usually without success.
He does, however, have a look.
A slight side-eye. Precise. Measured. As if he’s aware of something you haven’t admitted yet — or something you thought you got away with.
There have also been accusations.
Nothing formal. But after certain meals — biscuits, gravy, moments of compromised judgment — responsibility has, on occasion, been redirected in his direction.
He lets it happen.
He does not clarify.
Which feels… intentional.
Still, he remains steady. Present. Slightly judging. Entirely composed.
And in ways that cannot be proven, but are widely accepted —
he may, in fact, be running this.
🐈 BISQUE
Manager of Avoidance
“Refuses to participate. Occasionally enforces outcomes.”
Bisque does not participate — unless it involves delivering something that used to be alive to an audience that did not agree to the experience. No one has confirmed this. No one is escalating it.
She carries herself with inherited authority. Not earned — assumed. The energy is unmistakable: composed, in control, and entirely uninterested in your process.
There have been sightings.
A Kenny Rogers Roasters pop-up. Dollywood. Possibly both.
The timeline is inconsistent. She has declined to clarify.
She does not enter rooms.
She appears.
Out of shadow, heat, or whatever dimension cats use to monitor poor decisions. Tools go missing. A hand shifts slightly off center. The moment you were about to get right… dissolves.
She has been known to swat at precisely the wrong time.
To reinterpret a handle as a suggestion.
To edit — decisively — work she considers beneath her standards, sending it to the floor with a level of precision that suggests intention, not accident.
In winter, she positions herself near the kiln, absorbing heat with the quiet calculation of someone who has already mapped the exact boundary between comfort and combustion.
She has filed a formal HR complaint against Tay Tay for repeated use of the phrase “step your pussy up.”
It remains under review.
She has declined further comment.
No one is following up.
She doesn’t interfere. Not exactly.
But things tend to go sideways in her presence.
No one can prove it.
Still — when something cracks unexpectedly, someone will glance in her direction…
…and she will not be there.
Tay Tay, Helping little kids get their hands dirty.
