Kade Helin-Burnette is a sculptor and painter whose work is shaped by memory, landscape, and a deep, physical connection to clay. His practice is rooted in intuition—an ongoing conversation between material and memory, form and feeling. During his residency at Azule, Kade returned to oil painting for the first time in years, reconnecting with a medium he set aside after discovering clay in college. He began to explore how the textures, rhythms, and geological patterns found in his ceramic sculptures might live on a flat surface, translating touch into image.
Alongside this return to painting, Kade spent time gathering wild clay from the land—gray from the creek, yellow from the roadside, red from the hillside—and forming small sculptural “rocks.” These objects are inspired by childhood beachcombing, his fascination with stones, and a desire to preserve place through touch. Through this tactile, place-based process, Kade continues to explore identity, transformation, and the slow, unseen forces that shape both earth and self.
You can follow along with Kade’s journey on Instagram: @k.hb.art or visit their website at khbart.com.
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Transcript
My name is Kade Helin-Burnette. I’m from Livingston, Montana. I did my undergrad at Saint Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota. I got a bachelor’s degree in studio art. And then I stayed a year and did a year-long emerging artist residency there.
And now I’m a post-baccalaureate student at Indiana University Southeast in New Albany, Indiana. But I work in Louisville, Kentucky just across the river, bartending. So, I took my first ceramics course my junior year of college and just fell in love with clay. And clay has been my primary medium since then. I mainly do sculptural work right now, but my foundation with clay was on the wheel, so I like to combine sculptural and functional.
And—but I thought I was gonna be a painter, so I haven’t really been painting since I started with clay. My inspiration comes mainly from nature, my childhood, but there’s not really a certain, like, one person. It’s more just lived experience and figuring out how to express myself and my shifting identity through my work. And that looks different based on where I’m located, and yeah. So like I said, I haven’t worked really with painting and two-D media in a focused way since college.
And just with how busy my life is, I haven’t been able to work in both mediums. In my practice, I’m only doing clay. I only have time for clay. So I really wanted to return to oil painting and see how my current work in clay would translate onto a canvas. So I’ve been stumbling around on the canvas.
And then also working on a couple sculptural functional forms. But the most exciting thing I’ve been doing at Azule is working with natural wild clay around the property, processing samples of that, and then making little rocks. And I plan to fire them and see, yeah, how hot they fire and stuff when I have access to kilns again. But I’ve been wanting to integrate local materials into my work. So this is really exciting that I’ve actually had the time and space to actually explore that.
These rocks—I’ve been making these rocks for the past couple months—and they emerged from thinking about my childhood and beachcombing and how fascinated I was with beautiful rocks as a child. And just thinking about the metaphors and why I collect rocks and trying to capture a place and preserve a memory of a place in a tangible object. I’m a very physical person. I process everything through my hands. So these also function as, like, little worry stones and also just collectives to work within my installations.
So these are all from clay found around the property on Azule
. This sort of grayish clay is found in the creek. And then this yellow clay was found down the road. And this red clay, which is incredible—it’s, like, very easy to work with and smooth—was found on the hill behind Azule. So I’ve been having a lot of fun experimenting with these clay samples, and it’s cool thinking about how to actually integrate place in the material of my works.
So my work in clay is inspired by geological weathering and rock formations, but it’s a very intuitive, collaborative process with the clay. I don’t ever plan out how my sculpture is gonna look, and I don’t know how it is until it’s completely finished. So this work is also completely intuitive, and just exploring those same patterns that emerge in my sculptures on canvas.
So I’m, like, looking at inspiration photos—a lot of photos I’ve taken. Like, these are from Red River Gorge. This is from, I think, Lewis and Clark Caverns or Mammoth Cave. But I’m just very inspired by the way that rock can change over time and be shifted by forces that you can’t see, and you can’t see the change happening in the moment.
So, yeah. And then this painting here is from a reference. So the first one is totally intuitive, but these other ones—I’ve been working off reference photos and just letting them sort of develop intuitively in the more final stages. But in all honesty, I’m kind of just getting used to using these materials again since it’s been so long. And my work back in college and before clay was very figurative, also focused on memory.
And now it’s less figurative, definitely more natural, but still very focused around memories from my childhood. And a lot of those are tactile and, like, stored in my body. So I revisit them in my work, and I sort of, like, remember them as I process them through clay. This is paintings, but yeah.
Yeah, I grew up in Montana and Vancouver Island, British Columbia, primarily. There’s a lot of incredible land there and geology, but a lot of my memories are from the beaches on Vancouver Island and those big rock slabs that just look like they could be like the surface of Mars.
So that’s sort of where the rock fascination, I think, stems from. But just—my work has always been concerned about figuring out my identity and processing changes. So yeah.