Photos from Jolie Perry, News Photography COMM 1316
Getting dirty appears to be part of the assignment in ceramics class. Here, students turn lumps of clay into pieces of art.
This class is a combination of Ceramics 1 and 2. SPC Professor of Art Kara Donatelli says, on this day, several students were finishing lidded boxes.
Other students, she says, were making bowls.
Student Kylee Cross is using her hands to pound a single lump of clay. She says she’s already made a set of five bowls that she’s going to paint today before they’re fired.
“I am a general arts major,” Cross says, “but I hope to go into ceramics.”
Across the room, student Danny MacDonald’s piece sits by itself on a table. He describes it as a sort of “autobiographical self-portrait”.
He says the biggest struggle in creating the piece was glazing the pottery.
“You kind of have to guess how it’s going to look after it gets fired in the kiln,” he says, “so I had to do lots of layering to get all the tones right.”
Donatelli says glaze firing takes about 12 hours.
Like Cross, MacDonald is an art major too. But he says in four years he plans to major in art education. He says he’s enrolled in ceramics to help him in his career.
“This is a medium that I’ve never explored before,” he says, “so this is something totally new to me and I hope that this will sort or broaden my spectrum in terms of what media I can use in my art.”
Cross’s bowls are now on display in the Christine Devitt Fine Arts Center on the Levelland campus.
MacDonald’s finished piece is on display too along with his classmates’.
Ceramics 1 and 2, ARTS 2346 and 2347, are offered each spring and fall semester on the Levelland campus.
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