Bringing clay to life

If you had visited the ceramics studio in Memorial Hall at Southeast Missouri State University in early July, you likely would have been greeted with silence from the students hard at work on their final projects for the ceramics sculpture workshop. These final projects will be on display until October on the third floor of the university's Kent Library, starting with an opening reception tonight at 4 p.m.

Weeks before the opening, though, all eight students in the workshop were working so intently with the clay before them that it was questionable whether they would have even noticed a fire alarm.

That type of concentration, however, likely is called for when your assignment is to create a human figure out of a mound of clay in a short amount of time.

The workshop's students devoted four weeks of their summer to take the ceramics sculpture workshop. Four very busy weeks. The workshop took place four days a week, five hours a day.

"It goes by quickly," said instructor Colleen McCall. "Every day we're in class is a week in a normal semester."

McCall joined the university three years ago and has been teaching ceramics courses to art and nonart majors. She didn't get the opportunity to teach what she knows the most about -- figurative sculpture -- until art department chairwoman Pat Reagan offered McCall a chance to teach a summer workshop.

According to McCall, the class filled up fast and attracted an array of students.

"We have students who have done a lot of life drawing and some who haven't done any," she said. "Some who have never worked with clay and some who are clay majors."

The class was made up of four art majors, two art education majors and two professional artists.

Senior Kathryn Ashcroft is an art major who had never worked with sculpture before taking the workshop.

"I'm really enjoying it a lot more than I thought I would. I was dreading it," Ashcroft said. "I didn't think I'd be any good at it."

For someone with no sculpture experience, Ashcroft took on a big job with her final project, an almost-life-size female figure kneeling and her head to her knees. "It's more expressive than anything else," she said.

Ashcroft said the figure would have a lot of grooves in it to create texture, which is a big part of her paintings.

And even though she spent 20 hours a week in the workshop, Ashcroft -- along with most of the workshop's students -- said she spent a lot of her free time working on assignments, especially for the final project.

"I think that most art students don't mind coming in. You don't really mind doing it -- it's what you like," Ashcroft said. "I think it's a misconception that artists are lazy. Art students work really hard."

Fellow art major and senior Jim Daniels was also a sculpture novice coming into the workshop.

"I thought it was going to be a challenge," he said. "It's proved to be tough just getting the clay to do what you want it to do."

What Daniels wanted the clay to do for his final project was form a geometrical human figure that is not unlike a cubist painting in sculpture form.

"Most of the time clay is soft, but I wanted hard lines," Daniels said. "I wanted to put something that soft in a different light."

Comparing Daniels' geometric hard line with Ashcroft's realistic approach to the human figure, it is hard to believe they both based their work off the same live model.

"Everybody views the [human] figure differently," Daniels said. "We focus on different parts, we have our own styles and aesthetics."

A glance around the classroom backed up Daniels' statement. Students were working on final projects that ranged from a classical-style sculpture of a female torso to an expressionistic sculpture of an emaciated-looking male figure to a realistic sculpture of a female figure reclining with her arms over her head, among others.

McCall was pleased with the diversity of the students' work and the way in which they each took their own vision of the human figure and brought it into their work.

She said the workshop was to "teach clay construction on a large scale and to talk about critical uses of the figure."

"They're abstracting the figure," she said. "They're using the figure in a meaningful way so it's not all about academic proportions of the body, but more about being able to express something with the figure."

kalfisi@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 182