Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Building And Firing A Ceramic Kiln With Alternative Fuels, Clay Sewell

Faculty Publications & Research

As high school budgets shrink and equipment becomes more expensive and as energy prices become less stable, why not build a kiln that is entirely off the grid? This session will investigate the logic for such systems, and the materials and technology that are required to build and run them.

Iterations, Thomas Lowell Edwards

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

For millennia, pottery has facilitated the communal activities of eating and drinking. I use pottery as a placeholder, a metaphor for human interaction. The central core, the initial inspiration, of my sculpture is the diminishing level of connection our culture actively pursues.

I began to notice a trend of increasing disengagement in American culture after spending time abroad and observing the amount of time other cultures allotted for meals, coffee, etc. with companions. I make sculptures that comment on growing American disengagement using various formal principles of art (line, mass, scale, rhythm, and repetition). I am generally unsatisfied with a …

Closely Distant, Crisha Yantis

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

Drawing upon my own experiences and observations of the world around me I use the figure to explore what it means to be human. This body of work addresses the universal experience of anxiety through the dynamics of both personal and interpersonal relationships, specifically focusing on fear of the unknown or what subconsciously lies just out of our comfort or understanding.

Often what is unknown is also what brings about questions of our own power and what we can or cannot control. In my work, I address ideas of power and powerlessness formally through what the figures lack. Their control …

Carrying Water: A M.F.A. Thesis Exhibition By Aaron Sober, Aaron M. Sober

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

For all of us, everyday life is punctuated by moments of victory, defeat, pride, and vulnerability. The process of welcoming gain and tolerating loss is a basic lesson in proportionality. My work is a personal reckoning with the contradictions that define this very human experience. Through animal imagery, symbol, and metaphor I explore the unpredictable circumstances that form a life lived.

We engage with, and understand our own place in the world through stories. By doing so, the avatars we create reflect the scope of our experiences, both sublime and damaged. The animal protagonists who inhabit my work are placeholders …

Form In Place, Normandy Alden

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

There is a 200 acre farm in central NY state where I am building a house, a business, a family, a life. My vision for these extends beyond my own capabilities and lifespan. It is a vision of elegance, simplicity and utility. My pots are reflections of this vision, and embody the qualities of the life I seek. They are both exuberant and quiet, expansive and constrained.

The landscape surrounding my farm swoops and recedes with grace. Lines of windrows curve over hayfields, beautifully articulating undulations in topography. Nothing about this agricultural landscape is incidental. The lines and textures I …

Fare Thee Well, Georgia L. Godwin

LSU Master's Theses

The common thread in all my work is time—its passage, effects, and remembrance. I have created a series of works that are meditations on time, the ephemeral quality of memory and the effects of aging, profession, and life decisions on our bodies, especially faces. The physical materials and my treatment of them reinforce these themes, showing the erosive qualities of earth, and drawing inspiration from natural features that signify the passage of time such as desert hoodoos, desert varnish, old wood, erosion and chemical oxidation, and from man-­‐made features such as old documents that have been written, erased, and rewritten. …

Built To Play, Forrest Sincoff Gard

LSU Master's Theses

Built to Play is an interactive art exhibition featuring four participatory installations. Each installation transforms non-playful objects and activities into handmade porcelain replicas used for exciting gallery made games. Focusing on the carry over from child’s play to adult play the exhibition emphasizes the importance of play in our adult lives. As gallery visitors risk breaking handmade ceramic objects for a moment of fun and a chance to win art as a prize, their interaction completes the exhibition.

Layered Recollections, Jennifer Elizabeth Hager

LSU Master's Theses

Layered Recollections is an installation of functional pottery that evokes feelings of nostalgia and longing associated with the home environment. I am interested in creating memories through the use of pottery. It is my intention to make work that creates happiness in the user’s lives and brings joy to everyday routines through floral imagery. Each installation in the exhibition references an area in the home.

[Implied Depth]*, Hope Thier

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

While snooping through my great grandmother's belongings, I found late 19th and early 20th century photographs and stories of untold familial histories, from that of my own family and others. I have taken to adopting these families, and I am attracted to these almost forgotten narratives and developing these incomplete truths about past relatives into fictionalized characters and false histories. I strive to develop a chaotic but structured quality in my work. While doing so, I explore relationships. The relationships evolve between myself and the material, myself and the characters, and the characters and the material. By observing and learning …

Ordinary Perspective, Autumn Rose Higgins

LSU Master's Theses

Ordinary Perspective is a body of ceramic work that shows a representation of a typical day, highlighting ordinary moments and creating a portrait of everyday life. This work distills down experiences into still images that sum-up the experience of the “In-Between” moments. These are the times that are not committed to memory, but are an essential part of our everyday lives. In this body of work I am addressing places where people are expected to take on the role of a loner. By observing people who are together, but not in a group allows me to observe the details of …

Mythical Figures & Mucawas: Ceramics From The Ecuadorian Amazon, Joe Molinaro, Richard Burkett

Joe Molinaro

Pottery in the Ecuadorian Amazon Basin is rapidly disappearing as plastic and aluminum containers replace the traditional pottery. Mythical Figures focuses on three of the best indigenous potters from the Kichwa culture: women who both make traditional pottery vessels such as the intricately decorated chicha drinking bowl called a mucawa, and who also create fascinating figurative work that comes from Kichwa mythology and their imaginations. The book contains photographic portfolios of mucawas and also figurative work made from clay, along with a wealth of images of pottery making and other cultural and environmental images. The authors have worked together for …