Del Harrow is an American artist whose work has played an important role in expanding the relationship between ceramics, sculpture, digital technology, and contemporary craft. Combining traditional processes of working with clay with digital modeling, scanning, computer-controlled fabrication, and other emerging technologies, Harrow creates objects that examine how tools shape not only the things we make but the ways we think about making.
Rather than treating digital fabrication as a replacement for handwork, Harrow is interested in the productive tension between the two. His sculptures often begin through a process of movement between physical and digital space: an object may be modeled by hand, scanned, altered on a computer, fabricated mechanically, returned to clay, and transformed again through touch, glazing, firing, and assembly. Each translation introduces new information and removes something from the stage before it, making process itself central to the finished work.
Harrow's sculptures frequently retain evidence of these different modes of production. Geometries associated with computer modeling coexist with fingerprints, seams, irregular surfaces, and the unpredictable effects of firing. Forms may appear simultaneously ancient and technologically generated, recalling vessels, tools, architectural fragments, geological formations, or speculative objects whose original function is unknown.
The vessel remains an important reference throughout Harrow's practice, even when his objects move decisively into sculpture. Rather than rejecting the history of ceramics, he treats it as a continually evolving system of knowledge. Traditional processes such as throwing, hand-building, molding, glazing, and firing exist alongside CNC milling, 3D modeling, scanning, and digitally controlled fabrication.
At Haw Contemporary, Harrow presented Breath in 2014, exploring structures of parts and wholes through still life, morphology, ceramic sculpture, and installation. He appeared with Andy Brayman and Sanam Emami in Architecture of Touch in 2015. His later solo exhibitions include A Head is just a Ball with Eyes (2019), No Ideas but in Things (2023), and Three Rooms (2026). Across these exhibitions, Harrow's work has continued to investigate material, pattern, systems, digital fabrication, and the relationship between handmade and technologically mediated form.
Harrow's work is held in permanent collections including the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and Arizona State University Art Museum.
In 2020, Harrow was named a United States Artists Fellow. His projects have also received support from the Center for Craft and the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts.
Harrow is Professor of Art at Colorado State University, where he teaches ceramics, sculpture, and digital fabrication. He lives and works in Fort Collins, Colorado.
