Photo by J. Adrian Wylie
“I prefer to be struggling in Ann Arbor as an artist than wasting every waking hour on my planet putting money into someone else’s pocket,” says Kymm Clark, whose circuitous journey has brought her back to Tree Town to her new collaborative fabrication studio, LullCo.
From a nontraditional upbringing in Ortonville, Clark, who turns forty-five in June, has defied convention and embodied a do-it-yourself ethos, borne of both necessity and audacity.
Clark’s parents had four children together and six others from earlier relationships, but “I don’t think I ever saw them in a room together,” she says during a wide-ranging chat interspersed with instructional tips to a novice upholstering a chair in her Plaza Dr. studio.
The second-youngest, she lived mostly with her dad, an ex-military man who preceded contemporary notions of attachment parenting: much of her childhood was spent outdoors in all weather.
“My brothers and I used to pick through people’s trash and grab their junk, drag it out to the woods, and build forts out of it,” she recalls. “We had two-story forts using an old leftover deer blind or something, just convincing the neighbor kids to come out, and building carnivals or whatever.
“We just lived in the woods.”
At age thirteen, she opted to live with her mother in nearby Goodrich, but the “cool mom” who represented more freedom took the liberty of moving to Idaho three years later to pursue a relationship formed over the early internet.
She stayed behind with a best friend, whose parents “took in a lot of stray kids.” They’re now “my closest family,” she says.
In high school at Mott Middle College, social justice was woven through the curriculum. That informed her various volunteerism, Occupy-movement activism, and eventually, an unlikely bid for public office.
She identified with Bettie Page, the 1950s pinup icon and burlesque star, who had her own complicated youth. Her body art includes several Page poses, and she worked as a tattoo artist and body piercer for six years.
She had her first child, Maeleigh, and studied at the U-M Flint—first social work, then education, then graphic design and marketing. She also helped found a Roller Derby league, drawn to the theatrics of the rough-and-tumble sport. “It was kind of like a punk rock three-ring circus in the early days, and that was what I loved about it.”
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At her first event, the twenty-seven-year-old single mom met Crosby Clark, four years her junior. They’ve been together ever since, adding Evylynn and Hazel to the family.
She left school two months shy of graduation for an email marketing job in Ann Arbor—“I thought I’d made it!”—only to be laid off in the Great Recession. Crosby took up welding at Washtenaw Community College, while she pivoted to consulting.
When she found a gig developing a customer digital rewards program for independent grocers, they moved to Madison Heights. Crosby worked in metal fabrication, and the personal projects they pursued in the lull after work planted the seeds that would grow into LullCo.
For Kymm, it was upholstery, turning others’ trash into treasure. “There’s all this stuff people buy to make themselves feel better, and then they throw away and forget about whatever feeling it gave them to begin with. I’m just collecting those and showing people how there’s still use and value for that,” she explains, extending into personal metaphor: “You don’t have to be shiny and new, and you don’t have to be expensive or designer. You can just be the thing that it is that makes you happy.”
Her social consciousness was piqued with the first election of Donald Trump, but “the protests and stuff felt like a waste of time,” she reflects. So drawing on her online marketing moxie, she dyed her hair blue and ran for the Madison Heights city council in 2019.
She eschewed door-knocking, mailers, and other traditional campaigning. She got the voter rolls of the working-class Oakland County suburb, “looked everyone up on Facebook, and added them as a friend instead. And not everybody became my friend, but everybody saw me.” She won by a margin of three votes.
On council, she proposed what became the city’s Human Relations and Equity Commission and helped the community deal with the fallout of “green ooze” environmental contamination from a long-mismanaged electroplating business. But she found more competition than cooperation on council, and when her colleagues passed a social media policy that seemed to her targeted at her main avenue to the public, she bowed out in 2021.
By then, their mom-and-pop fabrication shop couldn’t keep up with its pandemic-era orders. It sounds like a good problem to have, but it proved unsolvable: finding committed workers was hard enough, “but also, we had a real difficulty training people while in production.”
They closed down the business and moved to Ann Arbor again. Crosby went back to outside work, and Kymm connected with Maker Works, bartering her social media marketing skills for its fund drive in exchange for classroom space. In the past three years, more than 500 students have travelled from several states to pay for her hands-on instruction, and in the past three months her time-lapse videos of her reupholstry work have been viewed more than two million times on TikTok and other platforms.
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The couple’s new workshop, just steps away from Maker Works in Airport Plaza, is a heterogeneous hub for artists and skilled trades professionals and students. They do their own work, but also offer studio-floor access and suites for collaborators. When they get a commission, they’ll often ask the client to sponsor a student, who gains experience while producing a professional product. They also sell supplies and materials, including a range of “dead stock” textiles, mostly for upholstery but some for quilting and clothing too. Free fixtures from a closed Joann Fabric store helped furnish the space.
Kymm’s collaborative efforts also include restoring furniture and training volunteers for House N2 Home, a nonprofit which provides furnishings for those transitioning out of homelessness.
They’re renting a house in the Bryant neighborhood and have found more community there in three years than in a decade in Madison Heights.
“I will say that this is a bubble,” she smiles. “It is crazier outside of this town than I think most people think. But that was what we wanted, the protection and safety and peace of mind of living somewhere where maybe they shared a little bit more of our ideals. I just need to surround myself with art, creativity, and positive people.”
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