Ceramist Kelsie Rudolph has been homing in on ceramics for over a decade. The Helena, Montana–based artist moved to the state in 2015 from her native Wisconsin to earn an MFA in ceramics after studying the craft as an undergrad. “In grad school is when I started exploring large-scale sculpture,” she tells Business of Home. “I was mostly working with pottery before that, and then transitioned into sculptural stuff and investigating architectural space and the psychology behind architecture.” Originally interested in woodworking, Rudolph pivoted to ceramics because she was fascinated by how malleable and forgiving clay is.
This passion for the art led Rudolph to a six-week internship with the Korean furniture designer Hun-Chung Lee at his studio in Seoul, where she was immersed in the design world and learned what it takes to run her own studio. “After that [internship] is when I started to really understand what a studio was in the design world. In the last few years, this has evolved into the studio and the job, and a [more formal] production [operation],” she says. “Before, since I come from an art background, I just kind of felt like an artist floating in the wind. Eight years ago is when I started exclusively working as a furniture maker and designer.”
Rudolph finds a lot of her inspiration from architecture. “Naturally and intuitively, that’s where I start. It’s not very direct, like one-to-one, but I like arches and shadows that can be cast from a variety of angles,” she says. For the past few years, she has been focusing more on collections and tying pieces to specific concepts and emotions through a more cohesive combination of architectural references, angles and curves. She starts with a sketch, which is then transferred over to a tiny maquette before she makes a more measured sketch with specific dimensions. “I found it easier to render small versions of what I’m thinking, and then it’s easier to edit from there; a lot of the time lately, I’ll have to build templates,” she explains. “So, after the sketching and small models, I’ll make templates if I need to, just to cut out basic forms for the piece.”
Rudolph’s very first collection, Softened, remains one of her favorites. The soft lines were an emotional reaction to a difficult period she was going through in her life, and marked her first departure from the hard edges she had experimented with prior. “It was really exciting for me as a maker to try something completely new and have to trial-and-error a curve over an angle. It ended up taking me a while to figure that out,” she says. “I loved that collection, and it still inspires and informs every collection since then.”
Her most recent collection debuted at Shelter this past spring during New York Design Week. Titled Doux—or “soft” in French—the six-piece furniture assortment was inspired by a residency Rudolph attended in Versailles last fall, and was influenced by the contrast of history and the modern world she noticed during her two-month stay in the area. “It was really crazy to see that dichotomy. I was taking all these really ornate fixtures and trying to not minimize them but turn them into Kelsie’s minimal approach to the same kind of ornate thing,” she says. “These grounded legs are referencing the archways everywhere. It’s pulling from architecture, and then also that contrast of contemporary next to the historic, and just trying to process that.”
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Rudolph will soon be moving two hours away from her current home and studio to Livingston (just east of Bozeman), where she will share a much larger shop space with a woodworker and metalworker. She looks forward to having access to those skill sets and materials, which she plans to incorporate into her work. “I’m super excited about adding variety in material to my process,” she says. “I can make fresh and new and unique pieces, and hopefully that just keeps growing. I’m obsessed with what I do, and I feel really lucky every day that I get to do it.”
For more information on Kelsie Rudolph, check out her website and Instagram.
