Kevin Sudeith ( He/Him )

Kevin Sudeith’s practice centers on the creation of contemporary petroglyphs as a means of documenting life in the present moment. Drawing from a background in painting, drawing, and ceramics—and inspired by ancient rock art traditions—Sudeith carves images directly into stone, an enduring surface historically used to record human experience. Through this process, he reclaims the petroglyph as a living form, one capable of reflecting 21st-century culture. These public art pieces are open for the public to enjoy at their leisure.

Sudeith’s work operates at the intersection of time, matter, and inscription. Through the ancient act of carving stone, he produces marks that are both immediate and enduring— gestures embedded within geological bodies yet shaped by contemporary life. He approaches rock not as a passive surface, but as an active collaborator: a site of memory, resistance, and duration. Each incision becomes a negotiation between artist and material, where permanence is never fixed but continually reinterpreted.

Place and community are foundational to Sudeith’s process. Each project begins with direct engagement with local environments and the people who inhabit them. From these encounters, he develops a visual language that draws upon regional fauna, tools, technologies, and shared narratives. Birds, boats, insects, human figures, and symbols of scientific exploration—such as satellites and space-suited figures—appear alongside one another, collapsing distinctions between the ancient and the futuristic, the ordinary and the extraordinary. Recent projects include site-specific carvings along nature trails in Phippsburg, Maine, documenting local bird species, as well as works created across the United States and internationally.

Following the act of carving, Sudeith extends the life of each work through processes of translation and replication. Using one-to-one rubber molds taken directly from the engraved stone, he produces ceramic objects that range from wall-based works to sculptural and functional forms. These pieces retain the tactile and visual integrity of the original surface while introducing new possibilities of scale, distribution, and interaction. In ceramic form, the carved mark becomes both artifact and adaptation—an imprint that carries the weight of its origin while existing independently of place.

Time remains a central concern throughout Sudeith’s practice. The carved stone suggests permanence on a geological scale, while the imagery reflects a rapidly shifting cultural landscape. His subsequent ceramic translations complicate this tension further, movingbetween permanence and portability, site-specificity and circulation. Together, these works function as records, echoes, and reactivations of the original gesture.

At this stage in his practice, Sudeith is focused on expanding the scale and structural complexity of his ceramic work. He is particularly interested in developing large-scale pieces that translate the physical and conceptual presence of his stone carvings into clay, including the ambitious reimagining of his recurring spaceman motif as a fully realized ceramic form. The opportunity to work at a larger scale would allow Sudeith to further investigate how carved imagery can inhabit space, shifting from surface inscription to immersive object.

Over the past sixteen years, Sudeith has created petroglyphs across diverse landscapes, including sites throughout the United States as well as Iceland and Nova Scotia. Together, these carvings and their ceramic counterparts form an expanding archive—a cumulative portrait of the present moment, etched into both stone and clay. Through this ongoing practice, Sudeith positions the petroglyph not as a relic of the past, but as an active, evolving language for understanding contemporary life.

Together, the carvings and their iterations form an expanding archive—a growing portrait of "our moment."

Kevin Sudeith’s practice centers on the creation of contemporary petroglyphs as a means of documenting life in the present moment. Drawing from a background in painting, drawing, and ceramics, and inspired by ancient rock art, Sudeith carves images directly into stone—an enduring surface historically used to record human experience. Through this process, he reclaims the petroglyph as a living form, one capable of reflecting 21st-century culture. He then creates a variety of ceramic forms from the molds of these petroglyphs, exploring functionality, color, size, and the technique of capturing the integrity of the rock the work derives from. These public art pieces are open for the public to enjoy at their leisure.