Clay Foster

Clay Foster (Born February 21, 1954, Austin, Texas) is an artist who works primarily in wood, but utilizes wide-ranging materials including stone and metal. He is a leading figure in the American Studio Woodturning Movement.
Early life
Clay’s parents were supportive of his desire to understand how things were made. He recalls that one of his earliest toys was a board that his father started nails in for him to hammer them in. For his fifth birthday, he was given his own handsaw. While his father looked after his initial experience with woodworking, his mother taught him how to use a sewing machine and embroider. This early and expansive approach to materials and processes, and the ensuing desire to create, led him to art school, where he studied weaving and fabric design. After three years, he quit before receiving a degree, feeling he needed to make things more than he wanted a diploma. With a restless curiosity about the world, he continued his study of art as an autodidact.
Clay’s career as a woodturner began in the early 1980s when he first encountered the work of Dale Nish and Bob Stocksdale. He was intrigued by the potential of wood as an artistic medium, the idea that a piece of tree could become a work of art.
Clay’s work first came to the attention of a wider audience with his turned natural edge bowls that measured up to three feet in diameter. Even at that large scale, they possessed a quiet beauty. The voids he incorporated into vessels activated Clay’s interest in exploring the concept of windows into interior spaces and portals into trees, became an essential aspect of his Painted Cave Series.
Career
The originality of Clay Foster’s work is due to myriad influences, including ancient architecture, utilitarian objects from Africa, and the weathering of surfaces. With diverse content seamlessly integrated, these influences manifest in a variety of ways. A sculpture might be simultaneously informed by Saskatchewan grain silos, Bhutanese temples, and rock art calendars, yet offers a singular experience, inviting the viewer’s interpretation. He prefers the viewer find relationships and meaning in his work, and if some amount of mystery remains, then all the better.
Clay Foster’s is in the permanent collections of a number of museums, including the Arkansas Art Center, Racine Art Museum, Detroit Institute of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and Yale University Art Gallery and he has had solo exhibitions presented by the Arkansas Art Center and the Greater Denton Art Council in Texas. His work has been included in a number of seminal exhibitions of contemporary craft and woodturning, including The Art Of Craft at the Denver Art Museum, 1987; Materials: Hard and Soft at the Center For the Visual Arts in Denton, Texas,1990; Woodturning: Visions and Concepts II at the Arrowmont School of Crafts in Gatlinburg, Tennessee,1990; Lathe Turned Objects Defined III at the Society of Arts and Crafts in Boston, 1992; Turning Plus - Redefining the Lathe Turned Object at the New Canaan Society For the Arts in Connecticut, 1994; Beyond Tradition: A Turned Wood Invitational at the Arkansas Arts Center, 2000; Masters of Wood Art at the Oklahoma Forest Heritage Center, 2000; American Woodturning: An Emerging Contemporary Art Form at the Rochester Art Center in Minnesota, 2000; Rooted In Innovation: Contemporary Wood Sculpture at the Arkansas Arts Center, 2004; and Nature Transformed: Wood Art from the Bohlen Collection, University of Michigan Museum of Art in Ann Arbor, 2004.
Clay Foster's interest in ancient architecture, primitive household objects, and weathered natural objects is integrated with his embrace of daily life, “Making art, building furniture, preparing dinner, brewing beer, building a structure and raising chickens—it’s all just life, not somehow separate,” he has explained. A chest that features a portal and reliquary began with a place to sit and put on shoes. Art is born out of daily life.
Clay incorporates various elements that are balanced to create a whole. He spends relatively little time turning a bowl on the lathe compared to the hours spent texturing, decorating, and combining it with other components. A turned vessel, intentionally displayed, creates meaning and significance. His unique approach to woodturning has resulted in his being a sought after instructor internationally and Foster has taught at a number of schools and conferences including American Association of Woodturners National Symposiums in a number of US cities, the Anderson Ranch Art Center in Colorado, the Appalachian Center For Crafts and the Arrowmont School of Arts and Crafts in Tennessee, the Association Of Woodturners of Great Britain International Seminar, CollaboratioNZ in New Zealand, and the Prince Albert Woodturning Symposium in Canada.
In 2014, the Professional Outreach Program of the American Association of Woodturners presented the artist with a Merit Award for his work as an artist and teacher.
*Clay Foster: Professional Outreach Program 2014 Excellence Award, American Woodturner, June 2014
*Works in Wood by Clay Foster, Published by Arkansas Arts Center, January 20, 2006, Essay by Anne Gochenour, Curator of Contemporary Craft
* Woodturning Magazine #238, April 2012, Article by Tegan Foley

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