The driving force in Katie Kimmel’s ceramic art is playfulness. Describing her humor as 98% angel, 2% devil, her pieces tend to center around themes like food and animals: a flower vase shaped like a dog or a ceramic shrimp cocktail set. It isn’t meant to be practical, but with almost 40k followers on Instagram – people don’t seem to mind that very much.
“A lot of the mediums that I work with are associated with kid crafts, and it could be that I only feel that way because they are mediums I’ve been using since I was a kid,” said Kimmel in an interview with Consort Design. “Sometimes I’ll really start to think about my work and I’m like, ‘Ok, I’m not an artist, I’m a 10-year-old living in an apartment’. Other times I’m like, ‘I AM an artist and my soul is 7 feet tall.’ I think that is a weird insecurity a lot of artists have – so maybe I became an artist when I started feeling that way.”
Since receiving her BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2015 where she studied ceramics, video, and painting, she’s been working from her studio in the Mojave Desert, California. Over the years, her style has remained fairly unchanged, but her craftsmanship has improved, and so has her sense of direction.
In other words: more fun is coming your way!
