Visiting Artist Highlight: Sudhi Tirnahalli

Sudhi Tirnahalli (he/him)
@HiSudhi

Sudhi Tirnahalli is a Clay Artist, Musician and a Technologist born in India and currently residing in the greater Seattle area of United States.
Sudhi was a visiting artist and instructor at Rain City Clay for a few months during Summer 2022. He taught a couple of introductory wheel throwing courses where he shared his throwing and surface decoration knowledge. Each week Sudhi imbued his lessons with his contagious joy and excitement about clay.

In July 2022 he had a solo show in the RCC gallery where he exhibited works made throughout his clay career. Sudhi’s functional pottery and sculptures were beautifully displayed in cases and on long raw edge wood pedestals he constructed specifically for the show.

Artist Statement:

Sudhi was born in Bangalore, in the southern part of India. His father was a Calligraphist/Hospital administrator and his mother an Indian classical musician/vocalist. He grew up fascinated with the tactile nature of human hands and the feel for materials. He became enamored with hand crafts early in his school years. When he was younger, Sudhi nurtured silkworms to derive silk yarn. He used the silk yarn to create woven fabric which he used in several hand-crafted projects. Growing up he also learnt classical music from his mother and other musicians which led him to give concerts on Indian National Radio and locally. Sudhi speaks 5 different languages and writes in three of them - he thanks the multi–lingual friends around him who contribute to his language proficiency.

Sudhi fell in love with Math and Science in high school and continued to earn a Bachelor’s in Engineering degree specializing in Electronics and Communications. His extensive work on “Design and Verification” in technology, especially semiconductor chips used in data centers and Cloud Infrastructure brought him to Seattle, Washington. Though he was able to exercise his left brain in his tech work, justice wasn’t done to his right brain considering his interests in Clay as a medium.

In 2014, while visiting The Space Needle in Seattle, he was trying to find car parking. After driving blocks and blocks, only one spot was open right opposite to a majestic red brick building. He looked up to see the signage – Pottery Northwest. Little did he realize that walking into Pottery Northwest that day would change his life forever. He didn’t go to The Space Needle and instead signed up for pottery classes. His hands have been dirty ever since.

Sudhi & guests at his solo show opening in the RCC gallery

Over the next 8 years, more than a third of his day was spent in the studio making pots - understanding design elements, developing forms and studying the relationship between form and function. He learnt wheel throwing, sculpture, slabs, casting, soda firing and more from clay artists at Pottery Northwest. Sudhi has also attended workshops at the Archie Bray foundation in Helena, Montana. He now has a home studio in Issaquah, WA and plans to add a “community studio” element to it soon.

Sudhi likes to highlight the raw nature of clay in his work. Most of his pottery has little to no glazes on the outside, exposing the naked clay body for its true color and character. He works with Terracotta and Stoneware clay bodies incorporating Warli Art (an Indian traditional folk- art form), mathematical symbols/equations, computer code snippets, and ancient scripts from the languages of Sanskrit & Kannada into his work.

Sudhi thanks all his pottery teachers for the love and valuable knowledge about clay and life they imparted to him.