Valley Local Turned Cosanti Foundry Artisan: Landry Low

Foundry Artisan Landry Low, third generation born-and-raised Arizonan, has only been working at Cosanti since the beginning of this year, but this career move has been a long time coming. In fact, she grew up just down the street from Cosanti and drove by the property nearly every day for the better part of 16 years. 

“Cosanti has been on my radar most of my life,” says Low, a self-described “maker,” who received a BFA in Fashion Design from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York in 2015 and in 2017 moved back to the valley where she taught a fashion design and merchandising program at a technical education school in Mesa. “After four and a half years, I left my teaching position to return to focusing on perusing my own creative endeavors and furthering my craft.”

And that is how Low’s career came full circle back to Cosanti, where, as one of the newest members of the team, she has spent the majority of her time learning the day-to-day operations and molding and designing smaller bells, tiles, and other various parts. But she gives a shoutout to Larry Lo Presti for helping her get started making some bigger bells - one of which you can learn more about in our story about this year's Raffle Bell, featured during our Annual Bronze Bell Sale in October.  

“This has opened me up to a lot more challenges when it comes to creating designs,” says Low, adding, “It’s also motivated me to create more of my own tools in order to further develop my own ideas and style.”

Low says her creative work has always centered around the written word and handcraft, particularly textiles and metalwork. 

“I have a propensity for tedious, meticulous tasks,” she says. “I’ve found the repetitive nature of this kind of work to be both grounding and deeply meditational. It allows me to process and make tangible the things that feel or seem otherwise abstract. It’s how I make sense of the world and my own perception of it. It’s also the way I communicate and relate that back to the world, creating a sort of closed circuit that perpetually illuminates in me a sense of direction and purpose.”

In the short time since she began at Cosanti, Low has already molded more than 1,000 bells and she has enjoyed seeing how the style she’s developed in her other creative work is translated through her bell designs. As a maker, she loves the process of puzzling together all of the little details that make something complex — such as a Cosanti windbell.