Katie Teesdale
Emerging Artist at the Clay Coyote
September 2016 – November 2017
Originally from the west suburbs of Chicago, Katie Teesdale received a BFA with honors in Ceramics and a Teacher Education Program certificate from the University of Iowa. Katie has taught and supported various ceramic programs in the midwest and the east coast. Most recently, she was the Education Assistant for the Outreach program at The Clay Studio in Philadelphia, PA. Katie is driven to create work inspired by habits, rituals and shared interactions. She loves to create families of pots, and endeavors to make sure that each pot has a friend. In the fall of 2016, Katie joined the Clay Coyote Emerging artist program in Hutchinson MN. Currently, Katie also teaches ceramics and sculpture at Dassel-Cokato High School in Cokato, MN.
Katie joined the Clay Coyote with the goal of starting her own pottery studio in three years. Katie says, “I was trying to find place that would allow me launch my own line of pottery and learn business skills to start my own studio, when I found the Clay Coyote Emerging Artist Incubator I realized that the program has everything I need: a shared space to offset the high cost of starting up, a built-in customer base to support my growth as I developed my pottery, and the small business mentoring that’s missing from fine arts academic programs.”
Katie’s Artist Statement:
The bodies, lives, and habits of people inspire my artwork. I use my work to meditate on my own story as well as others’ stories. I use repetitively and ritualistically applied textures to contemplate how I form both good and bad habits as reactions to my experiences. I am particularly interested in exploring how traumatic events (and our repetition of those memories in both thought and action) shape us and our emotions. Ceramics can be a strong mode of healing, and I use that potential to inform both my artwork and my teaching methods.
For me, ceramics create an intimacy for the viewer unlike any other art form. We carry ceramic objects in our hands, put ceramic cups to our lips, and keep ceramic sculptures all over our homes. I regard ceramics as a four-dimensional art form—each piece carries an aura that changes over time. The more an object is used, touched, or experienced, the more its aura changes and deepens. These intimate interactions are an important part of my artwork’s aura, and because of this the viewer is always welcome to touch and interact with not only my functional work but also my sculptural pieces.
