Kent Barnett is an artist and writer working at the intersection of material repair, memory, and lived experience. His practice centers on how things are made, how they break, and how they are brought back into meaning.

He works primarily in ceramics, creating forms that echo coral, bone, and other structures shaped by time and pressure. His pieces often begin in fracture or imperfection, evolving through processes of rebuilding, patching, and reimagining. Each work carries the marks of its making — seams, textures, and traces of the hands that shaped it.

Alongside his studio practice, Kent writes about memory, lineage, and the quiet ways people hold their histories. His writing draws from genealogy, restoration work, and the emotional architecture of repair. He is interested in how personal and cultural stories are carried forward, altered, or forgotten, and how objects can become vessels for those stories.

Kent lives and works in Virginia, where he continues to explore the relationship between material, memory, and the human impulse to mend what matters.