Bio:

Wendy Keeling is a multimedia artist based in Yulee, Florida, and the owner of Hidden Fire Studio. Best known for her ceramic work, particularly wood-fired sculpture, her practice also includes mixed media, painting, printmaking, stone carving, metalwork, and glass. Working across materials allows her to explore themes of identity, connection, and transformation, with a focus on the evolving female experience. Her work embraces both vulnerability and resilience, often pushing the physical and conceptual boundaries of material and form.

Her ceramic journey began in 1998 at the College of the Florida Keys, where she studied with artists including Paul Soldner, Peter Voulkos, Rudy Autio, Ryoji Koie, and Pete Callas. In 2002, she was selected for the International Workshop on Ceramic Art in Tokoname (IWCAT), Japan, an experience that deeply shaped her approach to traditional and experimental firing.

Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions at the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition, Macon Arts Alliance Gallery, and Jacksonville International Airport, and in national juried exhibitions across the U.S. She is a recipient of the South Arts Individual Artist Opportunity Grant, the Art Ventures Artist Grant, and the NCAC Individual Artist Grant, and has participated in residencies at Hambidge Center for Creative Arts and Sciences, IWCAT in Tokoname, Japan, and the Maxwell/Hanrahan Guest Artist Residency at Peters Valley School of Craft.

Artist Statement:

My work centers on the complexity of women’s identity and the many roles, contradictions, and transformations women experience across a lifetime. With a primary focus in ceramics and an  expanding exploration of mixed media, I use form and material as a visual language to examine how identity is shaped by time, expectation, memory, and change. The work engages tensions between strength and vulnerability, intimacy and isolation, and the ongoing negotiation between who we are and who we are expected to be.

Entering midlife has become a pivotal lens in my practice. This stage brings an intensified awareness of aging, sensuality, loss, and renewal, an accumulation of lived experience that feels both grounding and destabilizing. I am drawn to the layered selves women carry: the public and the private, the resilient and the tender, the selves that adapt and those that resist. Rather than presenting identity as fixed or singular, my work embraces it as fluid, fragmented, and continually evolving.

While the themes I explore can be weighty, some of the work intentionally blends humor with darkness. Wit, irony, and subtle absurdity coexist with grief and introspection, reflecting how women often navigate difficult realities through resilience, deflection, and quiet defiance. Humor becomes both a coping mechanism and a point of entry, inviting viewers in before revealing deeper emotional layers. Through my work, I aim to create space for reflection on what it means to inhabit a body, a history, and a sense of self that is complex, shifting, and deeply human.