Bob Shay
Birth Date: 1944

Artist Gallery
“Sometimes I think working with clay is like riding a horse.  If you’re trying to do something tricky on a horse, you’d better find a way to communicate using the horse’s language.  Asking will almost always get you further than telling and it’s the same with clay – if you’re trying to do something tricky with clay, you had better listen to it and find a way to hear what it’s will to give you.”  Bob Shay 2011 Bob Shay is an artist who has always been obsessed with the material quality of clay. Originally from Brooklyn New York, Shay grew up with a backyard of apartment buildings and city street grids. It was only when Shay moved away from the city and saw the world through travel, that he began to fall in love with the landscape (and the anthropology) of rural America. With the assistance of the studio glass faculty at the Ohio State University where he was teaching/administering at the time, Shay designed “Two Vases, ” one vase of two parts glass for a double wall effect and the other of double wall cast clay. On the latter he fired an unusual bright orange lead glaze that he had developed and become known for. Shay left Ohio State when offered early retirement and moved to Herron School of Art for another administrative position, followed a few years later by a move to more administration at the University of Kentucky. He obviously enjoyed administration.  But in the end, his final retirement lead back to the studio where he had always been an innovator. In the early years of his studio career he concentrated on challenging works like extruded sculpture with metal forks fired in its clay (It appeared on the cover of Ceramics Monthly magazine.), building a dangerous-looking arched firebrick wall splitting a gallery in two, and slip casting western boots in clay. The following is an interview conducted by Ceramics Monthly, January 2016 “Ceramics Monthly: After retiring from your administrative roles, first as department chair and then as dean of the University Of Kentucky College Of Fine Arts, how did you reorient yourself to full-time studio work? Bob Shay: There are two answers to that question. Reorienting myself to the studio was incredibly easy.  When I was initially appointed department chair back in 1986, I promised myself I’d remain active in the studio, acknowledging that it would have to be on a significantly abbreviated basis.  I intuitively know that it was going to be important for my own equilibrium and as a means to establish (and maintain) credibility within the context more and more difficult to honor but I don’t think there was ever a protracted period when I completely abandoned the studio.  Secondly, even when I was barely active in the studio, I was constantly imagining pieces I was going to somehow miraculously make.  By the time I left administration, I was like a kid in a candy store in terms of the huge backlog and variety of pieces floating around in my head.  In an event, the bounce back was natural and long overdue. Ceramics Monthly: How has your work changed after the time spent away from making? Bob Shay: It’s difficult to say how the work changed.  I spent that first year out of the office at various residencies regaining my “studio legs.”  Probably the best of the residencies was the three months at the Red Lodge Clay Center in Red Lodge, Montana where I vividly remember blowing up several weeks’ worth of work in my first bisque firing.  I was so disheartened I began to wonder if 25 years of maneuvering my way around people instead of clay were just too many to overcome. In retrospect, the single most significant obstacle was a lack of focus, probably the result of the backlog of too many creative and often unrelated ideas.  It didn’t bother me at first because I felt that I had the unusual and enviable luxury of having established my identity to administration and could now afford to make work more or less unimpeded by such constraints as the need to establish a single, identifiable body of work and the need to assertively promote that work.  I believe, perhaps incorrectly, that I was largely exempt from having to re-establish a studio career.  However, after what amounted to several frustrating years, it became clear that focusing my studio efforts was overdue and for better or for worse it was important to work within the limitations of what has become known as signature work. Since being back in the studio, I’ve half–sarcastically referred to myself as a re-emerging artist.  Perhaps now that the common denominators are falling into place and the work has some coherency, I’ll be able to drop the “re” from emerged.” Bob Shay has just returned to working full time in the studio after 24 years in arts administration. Since 2010, he has been artist in residence at numerous residencies including the International Ceramics Symposium, Czech Republic, Red Lodge Clay Center, Montana, and the Archie Bray Foundation, Helena, Montana.