Buck Smith

Buck Smith is a ceramicist based at Wheelhouse Studio in Ilium. He began in 2016 with a Wheel throwing class at Ah Haa School for the Arts and has continued working with the medium on and off in the years since. For the past six months, Buck has turned his focus to hand-built sculptural work, drawn to the way clay can be layered, folded, and textured into new forms.

Bucks’ pieces favor organic, irregular silhouettes, torn and undulating edges, asymmetrical forms that shift weight and balance. Often pairing raw, heavily textured exteriors with smooth, saturated interiors. The resulting contrast in surface and color gives each piece a sense of something split open, revealing what's inside.

His process is intentionally loose, a piece starting as a rough idea rather than a fixed plan, and is returned to, reworked, and refined as it reveals its own direction. This way of working treats sculpture as an ongoing conversation with the material rather than a predetermined outcome.

Buck continues to develop this body of work at Wheelhouse Studio, treating each piece as an opportunity to discover something new about clay's potential. At the Wheelhouse Studio, Buck works primarily in hand-built sculptural ceramics, pairing raw textures with smooth, saturated surfaces. Organic, irregular forms emerge through a loose, intuitive process, pieces are returned to and reworked over time rather than built to a fixed plan or intended result.