Keith Simpson

Favorite Piece Keith Has Created

Keith Simpson is an eclectic artist and maker of ceramics. His holds a BFA in ceramics from the Kansas City Art Institute and an MFA from Ohio State University. He lives in Alfred, New York where he teaches students to fall in love with ceramics. If he’s not teaching, he’s making art. His artist website is www.allthestrangehours.com.

What are you working on now?

A lot of projects are in motion in the studio at the moment. For Fort Makers, I’m press molding an edition of cars in colorful porcelain. It’s a really labor intensive process because we are formulating and batching our own clay, and every car is hand pressed and stamped. The result is a really fantastic little object that pays tribute to a classic toy format. And these aren’t really dream cars, but they are the cars we have, and they're represented with some really fanciful saturated colors – almost like crayons or candy.

Describe Your Artistic Practice

More than designing a object, I’m usually designing a process that will arrive at an object. It’s part planning, and part response. Clay can be an awful lot of things, and it doesn’t have to end at the kinds of objects that we might be used to interacting with. In my practice, I think that if I keep my eyes open, and keep the process malleable, then in the end, the objects that I’m making take on a depth that wouldn’t have arose if they were strictly designed from conception.

Keith's Breakfast

Keith's Walk To Work

Keith's Favorite Tool

Keith's Biggest Artistic Influence - Constantin Brâncuși