An Interview with Liv and Dom Cave-Sutherland

Q: Tell me about yourselves: How old are you? Where are you from/based now? Anything else you’d like to share?

Liv: We’re twin sisters, Liv and Dominique Cave-Sutherland, from the UK who work together under the name ‘Liv & Dom’. We were born and bred in England with half Jamaican ancestry. We’re both 24 years old (of course as we were born on the same day, 20 minutes apart!).

Q: How did you get into ceramics/painting? Did you study this in school or is it self-taught?

Liv: We have created and painted since we were children. Of course most children express themselves artistically in some ways, but I think we took it a bit further, taking it upon ourselves to do month long self-initiated projects together at home involving sculpting in polymer clay. We did all the art subjects we could at school, and then at university we both studied illustration, which we chose so we had the freedom to work in many mediums. At university in 2014 and 2015, we were sculpting, but we still didn’t work in ceramics. We actually didn’t work in ceramics until we did a 6-week beginners class in 2017, so we are actually very new to it. Other than those 6 lessons and the help we get from very helpful pottery master, Chris Bramble, we are sort of self taught. We still have a lot to learn!

Q: Your pieces are centered around the female body and adapt it in a playful yet delicate way. For example, the placement of the candles in your candle holders or the incense in your incense holders draws attention to parts of the female body that are often censored or “taboo” even. I love that. Can you talk about why you design your pieces from this angle? Is it a statement?

Liv: It actually came about from the first incense holder that was a man. We were literally just playing about with the body without thinking of any kind of social or political statement. It was just a nude body and we were just having fun with it! After a few months of making the nude man incense holder, the nude lady came about and it turned out so popular we based our entire brand around it. Everyone kept seeing these messages and statements in the pieces and having very strong reactions to them, so we just embraced it. Now, we like to think about how our pieces can promote body positivity and challenge the objectification of women. So, it wasn’t something we intentionally set out to do in all honesty. Although we do care a lot about these issues, especially now, we aren’t very serious with our art generally.

Q: The female body has historically been used as a muse, but in a way that gets sexualized— often hyper-sexualized. What do you want your pieces to say about the female body?

Liv: To us our pieces are just hanging out, having a relaxed time without a care for who sees or judges their bare bits and hairy pits, etc.! So, I suppose in a way they are challenging this sexualization. We want them to say, “Why do you have to really say anything about them, they’re just existing unapologetically, let them be nude!”

Q: What is your creative process like? How do you come up with all of your variations of products? Do you design together or do you design individually then share?

Liv: It really depends on what we’re doing. It can vary. Dom came up with the incense holders, and I made the first candle holders and candlesticks and magnets. Some things like our brooches we both claim to have come up with— honestly the line between our minds and creativity gets blurred sometimes, and we forget who did what. I take care of the 2D side of our practice, design commissions, and our prints which I will do but with advice and suggestions from Dom. Dom focuses nearly all her attention on the incense holders and comes up with new variations for those.

The design process is fairly quick, sometimes an idea will go from our minds to clay in a couple of hours without much planning. For some new pieces, especially 2D drawing pieces we get some initial sketches and planning down. Adding variations to the incense holders is as simple as one of us saying something like wouldn’t it be cool if one had a hat? Then, Dom just pops one on her next piece! Pose variations we find inspiration for all over the place, and sometimes we get into different poses ourselves to figure out new ones.

Q: Where do you draw inspiration from?

Dom: The usual suspects, a lot of Picasso and Matisse. I feel like a lot of artists draw inspiration heavily from those guys. I’ve been really into large slightly abstract nude sculptures since visiting a sculpture garden in Surrey. I think that’s something that will influence our work going forward — more natural colors/textures — larger pieces. We also get inspired by knick-knacks we find in charity shops by relatively unknown artists. Obviously we’re inspired every day by the awesome people in our creative community. It’s hard not to be, seeing so much amazing work being produced constantly, and it being so easily accessible on Instagram.

Q: You seem to have lots of demand for your products—they seem to sell out so quickly after your shop is updated. How do you keep up with demand? Do you ever plan on expanding your team beyond the two of you?

Dom: Things like incense holders and our new dishes sell out extremely quickly and to be honest we don’t really successfully ‘keep up’ with the demand. It’s something we’ve always struggled with. There’s always more people that want them than we can physically make in one month. The shapes of the figures mean that using molds/casting is difficult. We tried recently, and the result ended up taking the same amount of time to produce as hand building. So, I sculpt them all by hand which obviously means there’s a limit to our monthly output, as well as there being the limitations of only being able to fire what we can carry to the kiln we use, which is quite far from our house.

Our smaller products like the fridge magnets do have these “cookie-cutter like” stencils to speed up production, but the hand glazing still takes a long time. Very soon I think we’ll either have a large shift in our methods of production and/or get some other hands involved in the making of our products.

Q: Who are you designing for when you create your products: for women, for men, for everyone, for yourselves?

Dom: When we first started, I guess we had a target market in mind, mainly women, in their 20s and 30s, the kind of people who buy little ornaments and trinkets. I remember sitting down with Liv during the planning phase of ‘Liv & Dom’ discussing this. Some of the first people to buy our products were men though, so you never know when you design a product who might respond to it. For example, it was never really our intention for our products to connect so much with feminists. That just happened naturally because of the subject matter I suppose. These days, because we started out making products that we would never really buy ourselves, we do tend to design things that we like, and then hope everyone else likes them too! It’s quite a self indulgent thing to do, but it’s working for us and it keeps work interesting.

Q: You’ve begun to translate your designs for other companies. For example, the towels you designed for Slow Down Studio. Do you see yourselves moving into this space (designing for other companies)?

Dom: Yeah we love doing collaborations. Often they’re more exciting and satisfying for us than producing new products ourselves (not just because the bulk of the production is taken care of by someone else for once!) That being said, I don’t think we would ever want to do it exclusively. We love our little brand and aren’t quite ready to give up having complete creative control.

Q: Any new products coming out soon?

Liv: We’ve had a couple of new products in the pipeline for ages. Our nude candlestick and fruit dishes we’ve had prototypes of for a while, but we’re actually going to be selling them properly this month. Also, we have made three styles of earrings that will be coming out very soon! Large scale original paintings and a t-shirt collaboration is also something we’re working on.