Craft Around the Country

Kelly Devitt's Clay Bodies Invite Touch

The Iowa ceramist and educator channels pregnancy, motherhood, the physical manifestation of emotion into her unusual clay figures.

By Jon Spayde
April 2, 2026

Digital Only

Ceramics

Free To Read

Photo courtesy of Kelly Devitt

Kelly Devitt's ceramic sculptures depict the human body in all its strange and sometimes grotesque glory. These pieces, from 2022's Translations in Skin are made from ceramic, silicone, and medical sutures.

In the early days of grad school, ceramist Kelly Devitt felt the anxiety of impostor syndrome invade her body. It gave her a whole new artistic vision.

The Iowa native learned her craft as an undergrad in Iowa State University’s Integrated Studio Arts program, where she built kilns, made vessels, and worked with ceramic 3D printing in the school’s computer lab. But upon entering the MFA program in ceramics at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth, she felt unsure of herself artistically. “I was just really concerned that I didn’t know what kind of work I wanted to make while I was there, and I felt like an impostor,” she says.

The more anxious and unclear she felt, the more she wondered what she could do with those feelings.

“Soon I was trying to figure out how to visually represent this strife I had inside of my own body,” Devitt says. “That feeling that the person who lives inside of me isn’t necessarily the one outsiders see. I started thinking about how the body communicates without using language, and then, specifically, how skin releases information about us outside of our control.”

Photo courtesy of Kelly Devitt

Kelly Devitt in her home studio in Creston, Iowa.

Skin, she realized, sends legible messages, revealing our discomfort by turning pink, red, or other shades, depending on our melanin levels. We get goosebumps, we grow pale, our body hair stands on end, we get rashes.

Those considerations led Devitt to what is, quite literally, a body of work: ceramic sculptures that allude to—and send messages about—the body and the body’s link with emotions, usually in fleshlike forms that are inviting yet paradoxical, even disturbing. Many read as closeups of body segments, charged with energies and colored in various tints suggesting internal emotional states.

“I love to look at microscopic moments on the body and then blow them up to a monumental scale,” she says. “The folds of our stomachs or the folds of our arms. When you bend your arm, you get this fleshy area that bulges. The ridges on my hand that form when I work with clay. I like to shock people, sometimes by making something that is a little grotesque, or something so naked and vulnerable that people have to look away for a bit. People can be very uncomfortable seeing naked flesh, but once they deal with that discomfort a little, I find that they begin to investigate and may want to physically interact with the work.” (If she’s present in an exhibition of her pieces, she says, she always encourages visitors to break with art-gallery protocol and “please touch”)

Photo courtesy of Kelly Devitt

Two Faced, 2025, ceramic, 15 x 10 x 10 in.

“I like to shock people, sometimes by making something that is a little grotesque, or something so naked and vulnerable that people have to look away for a bit.”

— Kelly Devitt

The tactile sensation from that touch is untypical for a ceramic piece: it’s soft, a bit yielding, like skin. Devitt’s pieces are hand-built or made partly on the wheel, partly by hand, then bisque fired to keep them porous. Then she covers them with the “skin”—medical-grade silicone, the kind used to protect real human skin before a prosthesis is attached.

“I layer the first coat of silicone, and then add pigment on that layer with acrylic paint,” she says. “Sometimes I use a red iron oxide brushing material. I do that process over and over again until I have a nice buildup of squishy material on the surface.” After letting the forms sit in her studio for a while, she might decide to “injure” them. “I’ll beat up on them a bit, and little cuts or scrapes will occur on the surface. And then I might use medical sutures to sew them back together. It’s like a mending process of something that will never fully heal.”

From her current home base at Southwestern Community College in Creston, Iowa, about 80 miles southwest of Des Moines, Devitt manages a career that has seen her work included in group exhibitions in Chicago, Minneapolis, Cincinnati, and elsewhere in the Midwest and South, along with three one-woman shows in Iowa.

Photo courtesy of Kelly Devitt

Devitt's practice includes working with skin-like materials such as silicone and the cast glue pictured here.

Photos courtesy of Kelly Devitt

Devitt's clay bodies spill and fold over themselves.
Devitt applies silicone to ceramic panels.

The most recent showcase for her work was Body, a group exhibition that she curated at the Polk County Heritage Gallery in Des Moines. The show, which closed on March 19, displayed body-themed work in fiber, clay, photography, and digital media by Devitt and seven other Iowa artists. It’s the capstone of her yearlong Iowa Artist Fellowship, administered by the state’s arts board.

Devitt gave birth to her second child, Roland, over the summer of 2025. “I wanted to do something with my fellowship that still allowed me to be in my studio but wasn’t super heavily focused on pumping out work,” she says. “I also really wanted to be able to uplift other artists with this great opportunity that I was given. So a lot of it was administrative work, doing research into artists all around Iowa who work with this theme of body.”

Quoted in an essay by Des Moines–based poet Michaela Mullin, Devitt called the resulting exhibition “a visual dialogue between soft and hard forms—[where] fibrous sculptures and two-dimensional textile works contrast with the rigidity of ceramics. [And] photography further expands this conversation.”

Photo by Brittany Brooke Crow

Devitt curated the 2026 group show Body at the Polk County Heritage Gallery in Des Moines, Iowa.

The show was also a snapshot of Iowa’s art and craft art world, with contributors from Des Moines and the university towns of Iowa City (the University of Iowa), Fairfield (Maharishi International University), and Ames (Iowa State University). A major participant was Ingrid Lilligren, a ceramics professor at Iowa State, and Devitt’s main mentor at the school. (“She’s still my mentor today,” says Devitt.)

As far as ceramics are concerned, Iowa City is the state’s hub, says Devitt. “The University of Iowa is definitely where it’s happening. Creston, where I live, is about two-and-a-half hours away, but Iowa City is a scene that I’m slowly trying to inch into. I’ve toured their facilities and I’m very aware of things that are going on there. Wonderful things are happening at Iowa State as well, as part of their broad-based, integrated studio arts program, but the University of Iowa has a whole department dedicated to the ceramics field.” (The department “work(s) with around 150-160 students in 13 sections, and close to 22,000 lbs. of clay per semester,” per its website.)

As for Southwestern Community College in Creston, its entire art department is Kelly Devitt. She teaches ceramics, drawing, painting, art appreciation, and more. “Most of my students are pursuing graphic design,” she says. “They’re required to take foundational courses like 2D and 3D design, as well as drawing, computer animation, computer graphic design, digital photography, and typography. And I teach all of those things. I’d say this year has been the busiest year of my entire life, with having a baby, the fellowship, and being a full-time instructor.”

Photo courtesy of Kelly Devitt

Ceramic works in Devitt's 2024 installation Ritual at the Pearson Lakes Art Center in Spirit Lake, Iowa.

“I always use my own body as a reference for my forms, and as I was seeing my body change, my forms became more inflated—and then sometimes deflated as my pregnancy ended.”

— Kelly Devitt

As busy as she is, Devitt relishes the opportunity to introduce students to studio art. “They don’t necessarily have a whole lot of experience with studio courses, and I love being that person who can really light the spark for them in that world,” she says. To help counteract any feelings of isolation she might feel in a tiny department in a small school in a small town, as well as to garner support for her role as a working artist with kids, there’s the Iowa Artist/Mother Collective.

“It’s an online-based group, but we do exhibit together,” says Devitt. “I’ve been in two exhibitions with them so far, and they’ve just been a wonderful community. We push each other to stay in our studios while understanding the issues that arise when you are a parent and trying to be a professional artist at the same time. It’s been a great support system.”

In fact, three of the other artists in the Body exhibition besides Devitt belong to the collective: Ames-based fiber artist Catherine Reinhardt, who co-founded the group during the Covid lockdown; Genevra Daley of Fairfield, who works in both fiber and ceramics; and Iowa City photographer Stephanie Brunia.

Photo by Brittany Brooke Crow

Mixed Emotions, a 2024 solo exhibition at the Octagon Center of the Arts in Ames, Iowa.

Motherhood has had an effect on Devitt’s thinking, feeling, and practice. “The word ‘transformation’ has really come to the forefront since I’ve become a mother. My brain and my body have gone through many different transformations throughout those cycles of being pregnant,” she says. “I always use my own body as a reference for my forms, and as I was seeing my body change, my forms became more inflated—and then sometimes deflated as my pregnancy ended. I added legs to some of my forms, and that was related to the way that my body made me waddle when I was pregnant.”

And she has been learning and thinking about how skin can comfort, how it can help regulate emotions as well as reveal them, and what that might mean for her work going forward.

“I have two small children, and so emotions are very large in my household,” she says. “And I’ve been taking in a lot of new information that’s saying that if you learn how to regulate your own emotions and then cradle your child, it will help them regulate their emotions as well, thanks to this physical contact.”

Please touch, indeed.

Photo courtesy of Kelly Devitt

Self Help, 2022, ceramic, silicone, medical sutures, 4 x 6 x 6 in.

Jon Spayde is a writer and editor in Saint Paul, Minnesota. A former contributing editor to American Craft, he writes on art, psychology, education, and personal growth for a number of regional and national publications.

Visit Kelly Devitt online.

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