The audio file for this article was produced by the Ceramic Arts Network staff and not read by the author.
It’s 9am, and Kelsie Rudolph is at the wood kiln early to prepare for the firing she’ll be leading a group of students through. About a month earlier, Rudolph arrived at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou with Simon Levin, as his assistant, to build a cross-draft kiln and a train kiln: “We taught the students everything from leveling the concrete pad, building arches, stacking bricks in strategic patterns, predicting airflow and flame path, to welding the frame together.”
Once the kilns were built, Simon Levin had to leave, but Rudolph was in between opportunities and extended her trip to continue making work in the university’s studio and to help students fire the kilns they’d just built together. As students roll in for the first firing, she sees them holding a ceremonial sash and a boiled pig head; she’s confused.
She asks, what is going on? Students reply that the president is coming. The president of what? President of the school, they say. Caught off guard, she plays it cool. Incense is being lit, and students put the ceremonial sash around Kelsie’s shoulders. Having wood fired for a year at that point as Simon Levin’s apprentice, mostly in the same types of kilns they had just finished helping these students build, she felt comfortable reading the firing and relying on her steadily built intuition. With incense lit, Rudolph met the school’s president, followed along with the students’ ceremony, and lit the kiln.
A little ways into the firing, there was some trouble reaching temperature. During one stoke cycle, she looked inside the kiln and saw the floor under the catenary arch moving. Having fired very similar kilns regularly for the past year, she was certain something was not right, and shut down the firing. The kiln had not failed due to anything Rudolph had done wrong—some mistranslation had occurred in the list of materials needed to build the kilns. She trusted the intuition she’d built up to that point, shutting down the firing upon noticing something was off, avoiding danger and disaster. Every experience provides information. Unafraid of so-called failure, this decisiveness continues to propel Rudolph forward.
These days, you can find Rudolph at her studio in Livingston, Montana, with her dog Dolly, bouncing between projects including full-size chairs, side tables, lamps, installation components, and most recently a 12-foot (3.6-m) ceramic dining table commission she installed for a client in New Mexico. At first glance, her online presence is one of a prolific furniture sculptor whose works live in the design world. But ultimately, she started where we all do— with a lump of clay and a feeling that this material could provide a conduit for her ideas.
Fostering Interests
As a 7-year-old in the early 90s, Rudolph could be found drawing and then trying to sell those drawings in her neighborhood. She remembers, “We weren’t really nerdy art people—it wasn’t a contemporary art scene. We were all artsy and creative and liked to use our hands.” Her father, a computer guy and hobby woodworker, has a woodshop where he has crafted everything from the family’s backyard pergola to clocks for everyone one Christmas. Rudolph’s mother is a graphic designer, painter, and drawer who often brought young Kelsie along to life-drawing classes.
Her parents’ inclinations toward craftsmanship fostered Kelsie’s material and spatial interests early on. When she was young, her parents built a new house and shopped for an ensemble of Gustav Stickley furniture to furnish it. The entirely hand-made furniture and its finely crafted joinery left an impression on Rudolph: “Going to the furniture shop on a regular basis, looking at different types of wood and leather to go with the chairs—this is such a vivid memory for me—the materials, and touching things, and seeing different colors.” Joinery enamored Kelsie as evidence of materials and components working together: “basic processes, caveman aesthetics, the proof and the tediousness of it, the evidence of the hand, and material understanding to make it work.”
Possibilities and Clay
Rudolph attended the University of Wisconsin- Stevens Point with an emphasis in 3D Arts. While in a foundations class, she met Bill McKee in the woodshop, who became a mentor and taught her to use hand tools to build furniture and practice joinery methods. While she was enamored by the possibilities of joinery, Rudolph didn’t stay long in the woodshop. A brief close encounter with the table saw blade set off the SawStop and intimidated her away from the woodshop’s power tools. In contrast, she remembers feeling at ease around the equipment in ceramics class. While cutting wood and joinery required decisive precision at every step, clay offered appealing flexibility in adjusting parts to fit each other throughout the process. “I treat clay like wood; a lot of people tell me that. The precision of it—I’ve always been really drawn to that process of making things really fit tight, with sharp corners and right angles.” Clay offered Rudolph the potential to make some of the things she had been drawn to in the woodshop, but with a whole new set of material constraints and possibilities.
Rudolph was drawn into ceramics initially by the wheel. She learned to throw by watching numerous YouTube videos. Then, in one class, all the wheels were taken. She saw a banding wheel and started pinching—hooked again. At the end of her undergraduate studies, Kelsie identified as a strictly functional potter. She went on to apprentice for Simon Levin, where, in exchange for studio space and critique, she helped with studio tasks including sanding and washing bisqueware, kiln maintenance, wood firing, and eventually assisting in building several kilns at the China Academy of Arts in Hangzhou.
After her apprenticeship ended, Rudolph spent a year making pottery in the Twin Cities in Minnesota before starting graduate school at Montana State University (MSU). In graduate school, Rudolph began making sculptural forms reminiscent of architecture, which led MSU faculty to introduce her to artists working in the realms of furniture and architectural ceramics. During a study abroad semester in Taiwan, Kelsie needed to leave for a certain period in order to extend her visa, and at the suggestion of her professor Josh DeWeese, she went to South Korea to meet Hun Chung Lee. “[Lee] makes all these crazy sculptures and tiles, and has built full-blown tile rooms that have built-in furniture vibes. He is unendingly creative in that way. That’s talent to me, this unending curiosity.”
As Rudolph was headed back to Taiwan, Lee took her to the train station. She asked if she could come back to be his assistant, and he agreed. She received a Warren Mackenzie Advancement Award through the Northern Clay Center to continue her research and work with Lee in Seoul. Once there, Kelsie assisted in Lee’s workshop, making a chair and a table. But what stuck out most was Lee’s insistence that it was not just about the making or the objects themselves. More important were the business aspects of the operation, which allowed the studio work to continue: building connections and selling the work are just as essential as the work itself.
Developing Work and New Opportunities
Upon returning to the US, Kelsie worked on making her own ceramic furniture, slowly adapting methods Lee had taught her. First at Anderson Ranch as an Artist-in-Residence, then at the Archie Bray Foundation as a Summer Resident, and then a Long-Term Artist-in-Residence, Rudolph worked through idea after idea. “I had to make a bunch of pieces and fire them all the way through to get to the point where I’m like, oh no, I’m not gonna fire this one, I’m gonna trash it and start over. It’s a lot of engineering—figuring out how I’m going to do it before I do it. It’s normally at night, as I’m trying to go to sleep: Oh, that’s how I’ll do it.”
Although for some, a ceramic chair or stool might feel unusual to sit upon at first, Rudolph often reminds people that they sit on ceramics every day—toilets are made out of clay. In addition to their inherent relation to ceramic fixtures we’re all familiar with, Kelsie’s furniture works also reference ceramic history. Her roots in pottery and vessel-making are ever-present in her forms and material touch.
At the Bray, conversations led to opportunities, and peers became sources of knowledge. Connections she made during her residency there led to her designing a storefront in Chicago, and showing her work with Mindy Solomon at Design Miami. Rudolph works with interior designers and has shown at fairs on her own, hiring a graphic designer to build cohesive branding. “People these days barely want a website because they think Instagram and TikTok are it, but the algorithm means even if a designer sees you on Instagram, they might see you once and never again. I think we’re headed back to fundamentals.”
Once Rudolph’s family moved into the childhood home her parents built, vivid memories formed of regularly rearranging the living room with her mother. They would shift things around seasonally, out of boredom, or just to shake things up. Rudolph started rearranging her bedroom, too. Slowly shifting objects helped her build spatial awareness, material interest, and intuition, arranging handmade objects and mass-produced objects among each other. Now, she has become the one making furniture and objects people arrange among the other things that make up their home. “Especially with furniture, there’s this heirloom quality of things being passed down to generations, lasting, being of use, good quality. It has to pass that test for me, in order to go out the door.”
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The audio file for this article was produced by the Ceramic Arts Network staff and not read by the author.
It’s 9am, and Kelsie Rudolph is at the wood kiln early to prepare for the firing she’ll be leading a group of students through. About a month earlier, Rudolph arrived at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou with Simon Levin, as his assistant, to build a cross-draft kiln and a train kiln: “We taught the students everything from leveling the concrete pad, building arches, stacking bricks in strategic patterns, predicting airflow and flame path, to welding the frame together.”
Once the kilns were built, Simon Levin had to leave, but Rudolph was in between opportunities and extended her trip to continue making work in the university’s studio and to help students fire the kilns they’d just built together. As students roll in for the first firing, she sees them holding a ceremonial sash and a boiled pig head; she’s confused.
She asks, what is going on? Students reply that the president is coming. The president of what? President of the school, they say. Caught off guard, she plays it cool. Incense is being lit, and students put the ceremonial sash around Kelsie’s shoulders. Having wood fired for a year at that point as Simon Levin’s apprentice, mostly in the same types of kilns they had just finished helping these students build, she felt comfortable reading the firing and relying on her steadily built intuition. With incense lit, Rudolph met the school’s president, followed along with the students’ ceremony, and lit the kiln.
A little ways into the firing, there was some trouble reaching temperature. During one stoke cycle, she looked inside the kiln and saw the floor under the catenary arch moving. Having fired very similar kilns regularly for the past year, she was certain something was not right, and shut down the firing. The kiln had not failed due to anything Rudolph had done wrong—some mistranslation had occurred in the list of materials needed to build the kilns. She trusted the intuition she’d built up to that point, shutting down the firing upon noticing something was off, avoiding danger and disaster. Every experience provides information. Unafraid of so-called failure, this decisiveness continues to propel Rudolph forward.
These days, you can find Rudolph at her studio in Livingston, Montana, with her dog Dolly, bouncing between projects including full-size chairs, side tables, lamps, installation components, and most recently a 12-foot (3.6-m) ceramic dining table commission she installed for a client in New Mexico. At first glance, her online presence is one of a prolific furniture sculptor whose works live in the design world. But ultimately, she started where we all do— with a lump of clay and a feeling that this material could provide a conduit for her ideas.
Fostering Interests
As a 7-year-old in the early 90s, Rudolph could be found drawing and then trying to sell those drawings in her neighborhood. She remembers, “We weren’t really nerdy art people—it wasn’t a contemporary art scene. We were all artsy and creative and liked to use our hands.” Her father, a computer guy and hobby woodworker, has a woodshop where he has crafted everything from the family’s backyard pergola to clocks for everyone one Christmas. Rudolph’s mother is a graphic designer, painter, and drawer who often brought young Kelsie along to life-drawing classes.
Her parents’ inclinations toward craftsmanship fostered Kelsie’s material and spatial interests early on. When she was young, her parents built a new house and shopped for an ensemble of Gustav Stickley furniture to furnish it. The entirely hand-made furniture and its finely crafted joinery left an impression on Rudolph: “Going to the furniture shop on a regular basis, looking at different types of wood and leather to go with the chairs—this is such a vivid memory for me—the materials, and touching things, and seeing different colors.” Joinery enamored Kelsie as evidence of materials and components working together: “basic processes, caveman aesthetics, the proof and the tediousness of it, the evidence of the hand, and material understanding to make it work.”
Possibilities and Clay
Rudolph attended the University of Wisconsin- Stevens Point with an emphasis in 3D Arts. While in a foundations class, she met Bill McKee in the woodshop, who became a mentor and taught her to use hand tools to build furniture and practice joinery methods. While she was enamored by the possibilities of joinery, Rudolph didn’t stay long in the woodshop. A brief close encounter with the table saw blade set off the SawStop and intimidated her away from the woodshop’s power tools. In contrast, she remembers feeling at ease around the equipment in ceramics class. While cutting wood and joinery required decisive precision at every step, clay offered appealing flexibility in adjusting parts to fit each other throughout the process. “I treat clay like wood; a lot of people tell me that. The precision of it—I’ve always been really drawn to that process of making things really fit tight, with sharp corners and right angles.” Clay offered Rudolph the potential to make some of the things she had been drawn to in the woodshop, but with a whole new set of material constraints and possibilities.
Rudolph was drawn into ceramics initially by the wheel. She learned to throw by watching numerous YouTube videos. Then, in one class, all the wheels were taken. She saw a banding wheel and started pinching—hooked again. At the end of her undergraduate studies, Kelsie identified as a strictly functional potter. She went on to apprentice for Simon Levin, where, in exchange for studio space and critique, she helped with studio tasks including sanding and washing bisqueware, kiln maintenance, wood firing, and eventually assisting in building several kilns at the China Academy of Arts in Hangzhou.
After her apprenticeship ended, Rudolph spent a year making pottery in the Twin Cities in Minnesota before starting graduate school at Montana State University (MSU). In graduate school, Rudolph began making sculptural forms reminiscent of architecture, which led MSU faculty to introduce her to artists working in the realms of furniture and architectural ceramics. During a study abroad semester in Taiwan, Kelsie needed to leave for a certain period in order to extend her visa, and at the suggestion of her professor Josh DeWeese, she went to South Korea to meet Hun Chung Lee. “[Lee] makes all these crazy sculptures and tiles, and has built full-blown tile rooms that have built-in furniture vibes. He is unendingly creative in that way. That’s talent to me, this unending curiosity.”
As Rudolph was headed back to Taiwan, Lee took her to the train station. She asked if she could come back to be his assistant, and he agreed. She received a Warren Mackenzie Advancement Award through the Northern Clay Center to continue her research and work with Lee in Seoul. Once there, Kelsie assisted in Lee’s workshop, making a chair and a table. But what stuck out most was Lee’s insistence that it was not just about the making or the objects themselves. More important were the business aspects of the operation, which allowed the studio work to continue: building connections and selling the work are just as essential as the work itself.
Developing Work and New Opportunities
Upon returning to the US, Kelsie worked on making her own ceramic furniture, slowly adapting methods Lee had taught her. First at Anderson Ranch as an Artist-in-Residence, then at the Archie Bray Foundation as a Summer Resident, and then a Long-Term Artist-in-Residence, Rudolph worked through idea after idea. “I had to make a bunch of pieces and fire them all the way through to get to the point where I’m like, oh no, I’m not gonna fire this one, I’m gonna trash it and start over. It’s a lot of engineering—figuring out how I’m going to do it before I do it. It’s normally at night, as I’m trying to go to sleep: Oh, that’s how I’ll do it.”
Although for some, a ceramic chair or stool might feel unusual to sit upon at first, Rudolph often reminds people that they sit on ceramics every day—toilets are made out of clay. In addition to their inherent relation to ceramic fixtures we’re all familiar with, Kelsie’s furniture works also reference ceramic history. Her roots in pottery and vessel-making are ever-present in her forms and material touch.
At the Bray, conversations led to opportunities, and peers became sources of knowledge. Connections she made during her residency there led to her designing a storefront in Chicago, and showing her work with Mindy Solomon at Design Miami. Rudolph works with interior designers and has shown at fairs on her own, hiring a graphic designer to build cohesive branding. “People these days barely want a website because they think Instagram and TikTok are it, but the algorithm means even if a designer sees you on Instagram, they might see you once and never again. I think we’re headed back to fundamentals.”
Once Rudolph’s family moved into the childhood home her parents built, vivid memories formed of regularly rearranging the living room with her mother. They would shift things around seasonally, out of boredom, or just to shake things up. Rudolph started rearranging her bedroom, too. Slowly shifting objects helped her build spatial awareness, material interest, and intuition, arranging handmade objects and mass-produced objects among each other. Now, she has become the one making furniture and objects people arrange among the other things that make up their home. “Especially with furniture, there’s this heirloom quality of things being passed down to generations, lasting, being of use, good quality. It has to pass that test for me, in order to go out the door.”
To learn more about Kelsie Rudolph and her work, visit kelsierudolph.com or follow on Instagram @kelsie.rudolph.
the author Andrew Castañeda is a ceramic artist and photographer currently based in Red Lodge, Montana. To learn more, visit andrewcastandeda.com.
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