On Monday, Sept. 22, ceramics artist and educator Austin Coudriet held demonstrations in the America First Event Center and Bristlecone Hall from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m.
Coudriet made pottery and spoke about his philosophical perspective on the relationship between function and beauty in art. He talked to students and artists all day in free workshops and lectures. He also had one-on-one meetings with aspiring artists about the process of creating with clay.
“Anytime you watch somebody make what they make, it gives you more appreciation for the process. It’s like listening to someone play guitar or like going to a show,” said Jason Walker, assistant Ceramics Professor at SUU.
Coudriet was also a guest teacher for an art class where he told his life story and his history of becoming an artist. He was born in 1997 in Nebraska, and struggled with learning and speech disabilities as well as short-term memory loss for much of his childhood.
Throughout his life, Coudriet had a distaste for traditional educational systems. He felt like they were designed to box people into one kind of student or one kind of artist. He thought people like him were being cast aside or forgotten.
“We live in a world that wants to put people into categories, and I think that a lot of things don’t fit well in categories,” Coudriet says. “I’m not trying to make a classical sculpture or a classical type of pot, I’m trying to find some sort of artwork that fits between. I don’t want to be the guy who makes the sinks, or that makes the chairs. I want to be a little bit ambiguous.”
Coudriet found art as an outlet to express himself early in life. His father was an architect, and would spend all day with him drawing, playing with Legos and in the dirt, and showing him architecture, sketches, furniture and blueprints.
Coudriet fell in love with the idea of lines, shapes and colors being combined and intersected into more than the sum of their parts, and started learning about furniture and architecture design.
He started woodworking at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln where he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts. One day, he found the ceramics studio and knew he had found his
calling.
“I stumbled into ceramics because of the people,” Coudriet says. “What drew me to clay after that was the materiality and malleability. When I was working in wood before, if you made a wrong cut, you have to start the project over. In clay, if you mess up a cut, you can mend it back together.”
While Coudriet was practicing sculpture and pottery, he was upset at the debate over whether people in his field were potters or sculptors, and whether their works were functional or beautiful. Not buying into restrictive binaries, he dedicated his body of work to “dysfunctional vessels and functional sculptures.”
Many of his early works were mugs with unconventional shapes, handles and designs, such as a mug that weighed 45 pounds and another whose handle would fall apart if touched. He also experimented with furniture that looked like sculptures, often making installations of multiple independent pieces of furniture that could be moved, flipped and combined into arrays that were both useful and artistic.
During this time, Coudriet was in a long-distance relationship that inspired many of his artistic fixations. He made pieces that reflected the similarities between a relationship split by space and objects split by space, including sculptures with gaps in the middle and furniture intersected by random shapes.
After earning his BFA, Coudriet had residency in art studios in New York, Nebraska, Tennessee and Montana. However, he had to move back in with his parents when his house was foreclosed during the COVID-19 pandemic. His moving across the country worked its way into his art as he made pieces about the relationship of objects whose distance is changed through purposeful or accidental action.
Coudriet spoke of his inspiration and creative process, and how he is influenced by everything around him, not just famous artists. He explained that conventional wisdom in the world of ceramics is that everything has already been done, and taking inspiration from the world around you and making it your own is the key to making art.
“You’re not going to reinvent the wheel,” Coudriet said. “Maybe nobody’s made the exact piece I’ve made, but within the realm of what I’m making, someone has a similar concept. So I’m really inspired by everything and everybody. I met with a bunch of the students here, and a lot of the work they’re doing makes me go, ‘Oh, that’s a good idea.’”
Coudriet stays optimistic about his line of work, and looks to find the good in life and all kinds of art.
“I find something interesting in almost every piece,” he said. “It’s easy to be negative about things. I don’t think every piece is good, but every piece has something good. It’s about the combination of things that are less seen.”
He recommended that students who don’t know much about physical art or ceramics should visit the ceramics studio, watch the upcoming ceramics shows for BFA students and watch videos about the creative process online to learn more about art and get inspired to create things for themselves.
To see more of Coudriet’s work, visit austincoudriet.com, and @austincoudriet on Instagram.
