Artist Statement

Tristan Smith is an emerging ceramic artist born in 1997 and raised in Larned, Kansas. While Larned was his home for several years, he has moved around a lot, and he finds home where he makes life happen. Growing up, he often spent weekends, holidays, and summers with his immediate and extended family. Many of the activities he and his family would do were outside, whether it be camping on cool nights and watching a fire crackle, going fishing in creeks and ponds, or even just looking out the window during long car rides watching the landscape slowly change over hundreds of miles. In his youth, he had a mix of private and community art lessons as well as art classes later in high school. He has taken college art classes through Barton Community College, Pratt Community College, and earned his BFA from Fort Hays State University. Smith specializes in making loose, earthy ceramics but occasionally finds himself combining other materials with clay. The subject matter of his work focuses on the people around him, the Kansas landscape, and the connections between them.  He has won several awards for his work including John Heinrich’s Scholarly and Creative Activities Day’s “People’s Choice,” CaFÉ’s 2020 Student Honors Exhibition, and Scholarships for artistic merit. He takes the experiences and memories he’s had with people and nature to combine them into physical representations of feelings. Smith has excelled with the love and support of friends, family, his amazing wife, and energetic miniature dachshund