Ceramic Arts Commons^™

Memory Organs, Coco Ma

Theses and Dissertations

Working across architectural sculpture, sonic works, and monoprints, this thesis explores the body as a site where memory, materiality, and cultural history converge. Drawing from muscle memory, Chinese architectural thresholds, and female narratives, it traces a body that is simultaneously physical and psychological, personal and collective, constant yet always shifting.

Science, Fiction, James Nick Peelor

Theses and Dissertations

Science, Fiction is about death, mental health, UFOs, and having a mutifaceted art practice rooted in a DIY ethos.

Meeting People Where They Are At: Accessible Approaches To Ceramic Design And The Artistic Process, Molly E. Thompson

Publications and Research

This paper explores accessibility for disabled people in ceramics, drawing upon my personal experiences as a disabled potter at Artistry Community Arts Center in Vermont. I begin with a discussion of how the process of creating pottery can be made more accessible, with a list of adaptable tools I have discovered and anecdotes about how pottery instructors can adapt their teaching styles to different needs. I then explore different examples of adaptive pottery made specifically for disabled people, including some of my own work. While recounting my own successes and failures in pottery production, I conclude that imperfection is the …

Cuentos De Barro, Daniel Anthony Vasquez

Theses and Dissertations

Cuentos de Barros addresses the complexities of creating art and processing indigenous heritage and personal history as a Salvadoran immigrant within a neo-colonial society. Centering ritual, care, and healing, the artist imbues sculptures with tenderness using abstract forms and the tactile manipulation of unfired clay and graphite.

Folds, Bayan Abukiwan

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis uses the fold as an orienting metaphor and material gesture to linger on the minor details of intimacy that are severed by occupation and political violence. Through painting, drawing and ceramics, the work traces the more implicit modes of dehumanization—particularly in relation to Palestine—while engaging the domestic as a site of quiet and complexity. Influenced by artists like Jennifer Packer and Beatriz González, the practice embraces slowness, touch, and opacity to fold the viewer into a haptic encounter with the work.

Fountain, Sadaf Azadehfar

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis investigates the intersections of water, power, identity, and architecture through the lens of colonial and postcolonial landscapes, focusing particularly on Persian gardens and fountain sculptures. Drawing on historical, cultural, and symbolic frameworks, the study explores how water systems embody both practical and spiritual roles, positioning water as a force of control, resistance, and regeneration. Central to this work are analyses of arches and garden designs, which serve as architectural metaphors for cosmic harmony, community gathering, and contested space. Through a combination of visual analysis, historical research, and personal artistic practice—including ceramic sculptures and multimedia installations—this thesis traces the …

Xxx, Samuel Tucker Claxton

Theses and Dissertations

In XXX Tucker correlates the rise in online hookup apps and the fall of queer nightlife spaces to show how the internet has affected gay cruising spaces. They relate their installation-based work to the ideas of liminal spaces and Jean Baudrillard's

hyperreal. Further, they contextualize their practice within the scope of Robert Grober's work.

Default, Noah Pica

Theses and Dissertations

“Default” explores the formation and maintenance of normalcy, uniformity, and banality in American life. Noah Pica starts with the visual language of lined paper, prefabricated objects, model-making kits, and blueprints. He reforms these structures through a sculpture practice, investigating how their design inconspicuously implements social norms.

Ripe Spoils, Yan Cynthia Chen

Theses and Dissertations

Chen’s practice primarily focus on sculptures and installation. She explores the interplay between the idea of nature and the constructed environment, by examining how language informs what we know. The central thesis, "Ripe Spoils", employs citrus fruits as symbols for bodily experiences and personal identity, investigating their cultural and historical significance. Her sculptures summon the qualities and embedded meanings in materials like paper pulp and clay, wax and citrus fruits, often resulting in abstracted forms evocative of the human body. This thesis paper and exhibition reflect on themes like mortality and the essence of self.

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A Typological And Chemical Analysis Of Roman Oil Lamps From Poggio Del Molino, Brandon Tejo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Terracotta lamps, known to the Romans as lucernae, are small, handheld, often decorated objects which provided ancient people light. To modern researchers, they serve as tools for dating stratigraphy and iconographic studies. Beyond their immediately apparent aesthetic and symbolic value, the chemical compositions of the clay of these lamps reflect their origin. This study complements archaeological typologies with chemometric analyses to describe 16 Late Republican and Imperial Roman lamps recovered from the villa at Poggio del Molino (PdM), Tuscany. These finds were recovered from the 2021 and 2022 PdM excavations. The combined approach of typology with X-ray Diffraction (XRD) …

Dulce Sueños De Tierra, Sweet Dreams Of Earth, Jordany Genao

Theses and Dissertations

Jordany's paper congregates their archival research into an art practice that examines the decolonial impulse to excavate the self and produce autonomy. Using ceramics to reference and re-animate Taino ritual objects found in museums, resulting in alternative museology, their work seeks to honor Caribbean ancestors by subverting colonial history.

Contact Sheet, Jiwoong Jang

Theses and Dissertations

Jiwoong’s thesis paper is a field guide to how he navigates his curiosity with photography, sound, sculpture, ceramic, and installation. Connecting fragments through narrative vignettes, he underscores how chance, walking, light, time, and uncertainty inform his art.

Negotiating Liberty: Fine Ceramics For The U.S. American Market Before 1860, Presley Rodriguez

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis argues that the rise of the consumer market toward the end of the eighteenth century led to the production of decorated fine ceramics that became powerful modes of popularizing new ideas in the United States regarding independence, national symbols, and abolitionism.

Bloody Show, Leonie Weber

Theses and Dissertations

Leonie Weber reflects on how reproductive, domestic, and emotional labor is addressed in her artwork, and her experience as an artist-parent in the art world. Moreover, she specifically discusses mothers who are navigating their own artistic paths. Her practice encompasses sculpture, printmaking, performance, and installation.

Yellow, Sisi Chen

Theses and Dissertations

The following paper is a constellational unpacking of yellow through notes on critical race and feminist theories, myth, science, science fiction, disparate histories, cyborgs, biography, virtuality, materiality, fungi, porcelain, language, internalization, melancholia, smells, sounds, tastes, feels, and more feels.

An Open Bag, Matilde Benmayor

Theses and Dissertations

What do we take with us? How much space should we leave in the bag for what we might find? This paper is a journey from under the rug and onto the pavement. Sowing spiderweb maps I try to make a new city my own.

Constraint And Control, Patricia Ayres

Theses and Dissertations

I have long considered themes of the body. Drawing on my knowledge as a fashion designer, I bring materials and hardware from the fashion industry into my artwork transforming and rendering them non-functional. My sculptures relate to stories of isolation, separation, and confinement. The following pages will analyze how the United States penal system controls, constrains and restricts the body through physical and psychological wounds. Furthermore, they will examine how the Catholic Church controls people’s minds and behavior through a ritualistic belief system.

Generative Movements, Cabbage Juice, & Habitats Of Selfhood, Jason Michael Rondinelli

Theses and Dissertations

The content of this essay is a reflection on my practice as an artist. A summary of text includes an analysis of my attraction to certain materials such as drywall, cabbage juice and coconut oil, all materials are the extensions of my memory, intention and pleasure. From warm memories of bathhouses and the flesh of others to managing illness at home, my artwork distills a lived experience into material reality. These materials take the shape of sculptural networks that serve as biographical biomes. The architectural and organic components of the work are sourced from my own experience and the surreal …

Dress Up, Ye'ela B. Wilschanski

Theses and Dissertations

Dress Up (Performance, 40 minutes) is a dress that functions as a floor, blanket, tablecloth, book and walls. It tells a visual story about domestic care giving rituals, referencing different times and places.

Modern Arts And Pueblo Traditions In Santa Fe, 1909–1931, Elizabeth S. Hawley

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation examines art produced in and around Santa Fe, New Mexico during the early twentieth century, putting the works of Pueblo artists who lived in the area into dialogue with the works of Anglo-American modernists who traveled there. I take as case studies three artists whose practices are linked by both circumstance and agenda: Maria Martinez, a famed Pueblo potter; John Sloan, a leading member of The Eight and the Ashcan School; and Tonita Peña, a Pueblo watercolor painter. Weaving together Anglo-American and American Indian art history – which are too often bifurcated into separate accounts, omitting rich histories …

Layered Histories, Interpretive Desires, Rachelle Dang

Theses and Dissertations

I aim to excavate source material from the past and reinterpret its significance in the present through art. I merge history with the contemporary through acts of appropriation and material exploration, creating conditions for the viewer to grapple with colonial legacies in an affective space of visual experience.

The Emergence Of The Bird In Andean Paracas Art. C. 900 Bce - 200 Ce, Mary B. Brown

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the first millennium BCE, an enigmatic cultural group now known as Paracas inhabited the remote desert coast of southern Peru. Following its disappearance, Paracas culture did not emerge in the historical record until 1927, when three burial centers were scientifically excavated on the arid Paracas peninsula that gave the culture its name. The burials contained over 400 mummy bundles that preserved the only physical remnants of this culture and its unique art forms. When unwrapped, mummy bundles of elite males revealed multiple layers of finely woven and elaborately embroidered textiles and painted ceramics, along with gold objects, feathers, and …

Sawft.Servindat... [V1.7], Ray Ferreira

Theses and Dissertations

A descriptor of my artistic practice, a text piece, a series of linguistic musings, and more, Sawft.servindat… [v1.7] attempts to explore the dance between language, embodiment, and performativity. More specifically, the text moves through metaphor and metonym, Englishes, Spanishes, and Images, the performativity of representation and the representation of performativity —my body. My body moving across spaces and times. As part of the Sawft.servindat… series, Sawft.servindat… [v1.7] uses the scroll down format of most PDF reading software to activate the inherently embodied experience of intra-acting with technologies, resisting the dichotomy between the virtual and analog. Englishes juxtaposed with Spanishes juxtaposed …