About
Katy Geurts is a ceramic artist currently working in Saint Petersburg, FL. She is a teacher and staff at The Hive Community Clay. She earned an AFA from Parkland College in 2022 and a BFA from Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville in 2025. Growing up in the Midwest, she often questioned rural infrastructure and the composition of flat landscapes. During her undergraduate studies, she explored the position of art and craft in the lower-middle class and laborer lifestyle.
Arts and crafts act as a grounding and guiding beacon of constant questioning, learning, and growth. Geurts continues to examine the importance of art and craft through lived experience – a deep integration of crafting and life, camaraderie and loving of craftspeople, and rediscovering craft and art in mundane commonplace.
Artist Statement
Daily explorations of rural infrastructure, the natural world, and playful questioning are the core motivators in my creative process. Meandering through clay, I explore abstract vessel forms by intertwining natural representations, ornamental motifs, and narrative objects. Focusing on the presence of touch and choice of material offers support to selected forms and motifs. A combination of the latter provides an outlet for exploration towards capturing the temporary permanently.
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The vessel provides an attractive landing point in historical ceramics while questioning the pot’s purpose in the twenty-first century. I am seeking to satisfy a desire to trap the intersections of memories and moments in time to create a chronology of thought, feeling, observation, and expression. Although much of my inspiration comes from a self-reflective lens, we all share an inherent witness standpoint, or passive observation, to the world around us, inviting a level of dissociative admiration.
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The world and the United States are in an incredible state of turmoil that can feel so permanent, everlasting, yet simultaneously on the brink of collapse at any moment. Clay embodies this same, splendid duality of exuding extreme fragility and delicacy while being uniquely strong and resilient. Living within tension renders a feeling of powerlessness while calling for a responsibility to maintain control of oneself, those around them, and other factors far outside of their domain. In making work, I pursue a balance between splendor and fear, hope and despair, and strength and weakness.
Dancing between playful decoration and visual weight, I reminisce in the peripherals of life that soak up the energetic emotion of our memories, leaving us with a fleeting abstraction of absent yearning. I ask the viewer to question the nondescript normalcies of everyday life with gleeful confrontation and an unwillingness to abandon curiosity.