| Artist | kristine and Colin Poole | Resides | United States |
| Website | kristinepoole.com colinpoole.com | Medium | Fired clay Ceramic Bronze |
| Print Shop | kristinepoole.com/shop | [email protected] [email protected] | |
| Representing Gallery | EVOKE Contemporary Santa Fe, NM. USA | Themes | Divine feminine Personal Odyssey Humanimals Mythology Sociocultural Commentary Visual Storytelling |
| Follow the Artist | Kristine Poole Instagram | Facebook Colin Poole Instagram | Facebook | Press | kristinepoole.com/press colinpoole.com/press |
About the artists
Kristine Poole
Balancing classical inspiration with contemporary expressive realism, Kristine Poole’s work highlights the beauty and inherent narrative qualities of the human form. Developed on the timeless fundamentals of anatomy and attention to detail, her clay and bronze figurative sculptures feature diverse themes that open doors to conversation.
Winner of the 2023 IBA Grand Prize and the 2020 Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize Yasha Young Projects Sculpture category, Kristine’s sculptures have also garnered awards in competitions including The National Sculpture Society, Spectrum: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art and The Art Renewal Center’s International Art Salon. Her sculpture has been featured in publications including The Wall Street Journal, Beautiful Bizarre, CAST: Art and Objects Made Using Humanity’s Most Transformational Process, Masters of Contemporary Fine Art, Ceramics Monthly, Ceramics Ireland, 500 Figures in Clay, American Art Collector and Art Ltd.
She has been commissioned to create works ranging from the petite to monumental for various public and private collectors including The Carnegie Library in Michigan, Spectrum, The Denver Comic Con, The NM Department of Game and Fish and Big Brothers, Big Sisters of Northern NM. She has received numerous invited artist residency grants including Watershed Center for the Ceramic Arts and Buffalo Creek Art Center.
Recognizing the potential for the arts to enlighten and shift perspectives, Kristine has long been a dedicated proponent of encouraging creativity in others. As such, she is a monthly contributor to the Fantastic Art blog, Muddy Colors, and frequently gives demonstrations and lectures on art and business, most recently at the Albuquerque Museum of Art, Las Cruces Art Museum, The Goggleworks and the Santa Fe Community College. She was also the co-founder of the Spectrum Rising Star Award, which for several years brought recognition to an emerging new voice in the field of Imaginative Realism.
In 2019, Kristine was honored with a Distinguished Alumni Award 27 years after graduating Summa Cum Laude with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in Ceramic Sculpture from Northern Michigan University. She currently lives in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountains overlooking Santa Fe, frequently collaborating on sculpture projects with her husband, Colin Poole.
Colin Poole
Known for his classically inspired contemporary realism, Colin Poole’s bronze sculptures and oil paintings have been exhibited extensively in museums and galleries across the country and are featured in over 450 collections worldwide. His work has been recognized with awards in international exhibits and various notable publications including The Wall Street Journal. He has been commissioned to create works for Daimler-Benz, The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, Lexus, Lourdes Cathedral – France, National Audubon Society, The Nature Conservancy, National Geographic Society, PBS, The U.S. Mint, as well as numerous Fortune 500 companies. His sculptures are often based in mythology, spanning small to life-sized as well as monumental bronze public artworks. He has lectured nationally, including at the Smithsonian.
Winner of the 2020 Beautiful Bizarre Sculpture Art Prize, He’s been featured in international publications and won awards in Spectrum, IBA and ARC. Public commissions include the Howell Carnegie Library, Denver Comic Con and Spectrum.
Colin lives and frequently collaborates with his wife, the sculptor Kristine Poole, in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountains overlooking Santa Fe, surrounded by their menagerie of birds and beasts.
Kristine & Colin Poole is the 2nd prize of the Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize, Yasha Young Projects Sculpture Award 2023
Artwork Themes & Subject Matter
Kristine Poole
The first time Kristine Poole stepped into a clay studio, she knew this was to be her life’s work. “The smell and the feel were as familiar to me as my own hands. The tactile nature of forming the clay was irresistibly seductive, hinting at an innate connection between creativity and sensuality which led me directly to working with the figure”. From the beginning, Kristine sensed that the limitless possibilities of an unformed lump of clay made it the perfect medium with which to explore the infinite expressions imaginable with the human body.
Concept is essential in her work. Classically inspired with contemporary undertones, her sculptures feature diverse topics including sociocultural experience, mythology and reflections on her personal life odyssey. These ideas are developed intuitively on the timeless fundamentals of anatomy and attention to detail, blending the challenges of rendering the beauty of the human form with her inherent curiosity and love for storytelling.
With many pieces, she focuses on telling the story simply through the figure itself, but just as frequently, she uses the form as a canvas. Kristine often covers the body with text, juxtaposing a visceral reaction to the subtleties of body language with a time-based, cerebral response to the power of words. Relief imagery and motifs are also used at times to embellish the story of the piece. Both the text and relief work create patterns that obscure and at the same time emphasize the forms of the body, heightening the sense of being able to read a person’s interior landscape and experience through the external forms of the body.
To pause for a few moments, lost in the experience of a sculpture, engaging in the questions, considerations and imagery as its story unfolds is ultimately sharing a moment in the imagination of the maker and opens the door for the viewer to ponder and begin creating for themselves, if only in their mind.
Colin Poole
As a child, Colin Poole was invited to work in the studio of an old Greek icon painter. For the many years that he sculpted in his studio, he delighted himself with tales of the Greek myths.
These formative moments were a thread linking storytelling and art that has since woven through the tapestry of Colin’s creative life.
Expanding on this foundational love of traditional world mythologies, for the last several years he has been writing an original mythology featuring characters, creatures and stories of his own imaginings.
These tales come to life through a series of bronze sculptures and paintings that Colin concurrently working on. Each piece depicts a pivotal moment in one of the stories, and, as the stories give rise to the sculptures and paintings, they also inspire the tales.
Press
Poole’s work has been featured in publications including The Wall Street Journal, Beautiful Bizarre, Spectrum, IBA, The ARC International Salon, Masters of Contemporary Fine Art and Ceramics Monthly, among others.
Upcoming Exhibitions
| When | Exhibition | Gallery |
| April 2024 | Group exhibition: “25 San Angelo National Ceramics Competition” | San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts, San Angelo, TX |
| June 2024 | Group exhibition: “Character in Context” | A.R. Mitchell Museum Trinidad, Colorado, USA |
| June 2024 | Group exhibition: “Heroes Welcome” | Mazza Museum Findlay, OH |
| June 2024 (Colin) | Group exhibition: “Myth” | Modern Eden Gallery San Francisco, CA. USA |
| August 2024 | Group exhibition: “Sculpture in the Park” | Benson Sculpture Garden Loveland, CO, USA |
CV
Education
Kristine
Bachelor of Fine Arts, concentration in Ceramic Sculpture, Summa Cum Laude, Northern Michigan University, MI United States
Colin
Bachelor of Arts Degree, with a focus in Fine Art and Sculpture, Connecticut College, CT United States
Selected Group Exhibitions
2023
Beyond Original, Modern Eden Gallery. San Francisco, CA. United States
Serendipity, curated by Beautiful Bizarre, Haven Gallery. Northport, NY. United States
Hidden Worlds, Mazza Museum. Findlay, OH. United States
BLAB!, Copro Gallery. Santa Monica, CA. United States
ArtsThrive, Albuquerque Museum of Art. Albuquerque, NM. United States
Sculpture in the Park, Benson Sculpture Garden, Loveland, CO. United States
2022
Halcyon Days, Modern Eden Gallery. San Francisco, CA. United States
Mysterious Fathoms, Mazza Museum. Findlay, OH. United States
National Sculpture Society’s 89th Annual Awards Exhibition, Brookgreen Gardens, SC. United States
24th San Angelo National Ceramic Competition San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts, San Angelo, TX. United States
Mythic, DAE Gallery, Long Beach, CA. United States
2021
Animalia, curated by Beautiful Bizarre, Haven Gallery. Northport, NY. United States
Lucid Dreaming, curated by Beautiful Bizarre, Copro Gallery. Los Angeles, CA. United States
2020
Midnight Garden, by Beautiful Bizarre. Modern Eden Gallery. San Francisco, CA. United States
Creatures Most Curious, Mazza Museum. Findlay, OH. United States
2nd place, 23rd San Angelo National Ceramic Competition, San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts, TX. United States
2019
Representational Modern Beautiful Bizarre Art Prize Exhibition, Modern Eden Gallery. San Francisco, CA. United States
Parallels, Evoke Contemporary. Santa Fe, NM. United States
Inspired, Mazza Museum. Findlay, OH. United States
Sculpture in the Park, Benson Sculpture Garden, Loveland, CO. United States
International Guild of Realism Salon Exhibition, Sugarman Peterson Gallery. Santa Fe, NM. United States
Invitational, Sage Creek Gallery. Santa Fe, NM. United States
2018
CAST: Art and Objects, Wayne Art Center, Wayne, PA. United States
22nd National Ceramic Competition, San Angelo Museum of Fine Arts.San Angelo, TX. United States
Maidens of Myth, Mazza Museum, Findlay, OH. United States
Art Elevated, New York City, NY. United States
2017
Villains, Mazza Museum, Findlay, OH. United States
International Guild of Realism Salon Exhibition, The Marshall Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ. United States
Scarab Club Silver Medal Exhibition, Scarab Club, Detroit, MI. United States
Naked in Santa Fe, Offroad Productions. Santa Fe, NM. United States
