Andrew Kellner

Andrew Kellner was born and raised in Toronto, Ontario. He studied ceramics at Sheridan College before completing a BFA from Alberta College of Art and Design in 2005. He apprenticed with potter Martin Tagseth (Lake Lenore, SK) and worked at Watershed Centre for the Ceramic Arts (Newcastle, ME). In 2017 he earned an MFA from West Virginia University, Morgantown.

Kellner has exhibited in places such as the Archie Bray Foundation (Helena, MT), and was selected for the 2016 and 2017 National Council for the Education of Ceramic Arts (NCECA) National Student Show. Currently Kellner is a potter living in Hamilton, ON.

“I make pots to share my love of material and the importance of beauty in the home, which marks the beginning of a relationship that unfolds over years.

I am enamored by clay’s malleability, plasticity, and tactility. It’s the quick squishy responsive nature of the material itself that draws me in. As a kid I would play with bricks and mortar, building small walls or stacks when I would visit construction sites with my father. The physical weight of the brick carries sentiments of strength, home, and safety. These ideas are imbedded in my pottery. I chase after a personal expression of beauty, a casual confidence, pots that are full of quick and energetic throwing. Creating qualities of spontaneity, roughness, and heft that highlight the raw beauty of ceramics.

I trim back into the clay to expose the rough groggy inner quality similar to the gritty texture of early wet struck bricks. I use a reductive process to highlight subtle transitions in form. Creating edges for the slip and glaze to break, pool, and cascade over, accentuating the swelling forms of jars and pitchers.

For me, pottery only becomes active when we commit it into service. The pots I make are emblematic of more than a container of food; they’re a visual representation of time, memory, and history – which is actively added to and transported with the experiences of use.” – A. Kellner, 2018