https://ellsworthstudios.com/about-david

Over the past forty-five years, David Ellsworth has become known as one of the premier designers of turned wooden vessel forms. His work is included in the permanent collections of forty-four museums and numerous private collections. He is a Fellow and former Trustee of the American Craft Council and has received fellowship awards from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council for the Arts, and the PEW Fellowship for the Arts.

In 2009 he was elected by the James A. Renwick Alliance of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. to receive the prestigious “Master of the Medium” award in wood. He is also the recipient of the Lifetime Membership Award from the American Association of Woodturners, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Collectors of Wood Art. In 2021 he received the Prestigious Visionary Award from the Smithsonian Institution. He runs his own private school of woodturning at his home and studio near Weaverville, North Carolina.

Artist Statement:

As my aesthetic in vessel making has evolved over the decades, I have tried to maintain a delicate balance between what the material brings to me and what I can bring to the material. It is clearly an interactive process, often a balance between working with unique materials to literally stumbling on a rotten old stump that becomes the inspiration for a whole new direction in my work.

My “Spirit Forms” are designed to capture the energy of the observer, to draw them into the interior, and to hold them within the privacy of an imagined space. As the potter, Paul Soldner once said, “Never underestimate the power of small objects.”