Red Lodge Clay Center – Short-Term Resident (AIA) 2012, 2022 Workshop Presenter 2022
Steve Godfrey was born and raised in East Longmeadow, Massachusetts. Steve was fortunate to be encouraged and supported to pursue an artistic career by family and friends. In 1991, he enrolled in his first ceramics class at the Hartford Art School. He continued his arts education in Kansas City and New York, eventually moving westward to be a resident artist at the Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, Montana. Currently, he lives in Anchorage, Alaska where he is a potter and a Professor of Ceramics at the University of Alaska Anchorage. He is currently making a variety of functional forms out of porcelain and stoneware, and he also has interests in wood working, cooking, hiking, house remodeling, visiting museums, and traveling to see nieces and nephews in Massachusetts.
The process of designing and making useful objects allows me to undertake several responsibilities. I can be a formalist who loves the symbolic results of shape, color and texture combinations and an engineer who develops a unique approach to something we have seen or used before. I can make things that tell quiet stories that evoke strong sentiment. I also have the freedom to design work to compliment a space. With these attributes, I hope to raise the importance of my functional work from mundane to meaningful, from words to poetry.
There are many things that I am inspired by: old New England tobacco barns, the color of honey, glacial ice, Ellsworth Kelly plant drawings, Sung Dynasty pottery, Native Alaskan ivory bird carvings, Children’s book illustrators such as Harrison Cady, Tasha Tudor and Jerry Pinkney, Danish furniture, cooking, magpies, vultures …. As I am working in the studio, my interests to blend together and emerge as simple and clear statements that speak of my innate aesthetic sensibilities and the desire for my work to somehow stir the souls of others.