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by Cael Howard
As sophomore George Swapp chisels his stone he knows he must be careful. He carefully lines up the chisel and taps it with a mallet. If he takes off too much rock his final project will be toast. Instead of an elephant, it could be a slice of toast.
“I do not want to break my rock, elephants are amazing,” said Swapp.
In ceramics, students deal strictly with clay. Students make anything from mugs to masks. They also use the pottery wheel which spins the clay and you can shape your vases that way. In sculpture, students use clay but they also make a paper sculpture and their final project is that they sculpt a stone.
When the students see others’ projects it sparks their creativity and drives them to make something better.
“Usually how it happens is that so and so did this I’m gonna outdo them and I think it’s great it’s a motivation,” said Paul Allred.
In sculpture the favorite project of many students and Allred is the stone. It’s a challenging project that takes a lot of vision to see what they want it to become. Also they have to be careful and assess the condition of their rock. They don’t want to sculpt a crack into their sculpture because working around that crack is difficult and makes your sculpture easier to break.
“I really enjoyed working on the stone. It was challenging to take the idea in my head and carve it into stone,” said sophomore Josh Andersen.
There are other challenges besides the rock sculpture. The pottery wheel can either be fun or disastrous for some students. Allred once had a student that she didn’t like to tie her apron strings. When she was working on the wheel one of her strings got caught in the spinny shaft and it started to pull her into her clay on the wheel. Luckily she wasn’t hurt, but she did get a face full of clay. Even though the wheel can be tricky it gives more satisfaction when your pottery turns out right.
“It always made me happy when I was throwing a pot on the wheel and it turned out just right,” Swapp said.
Students have a lot of fun in these classes since they’re hands on and it’s art. They have a lot of room to be creative and have a lot of fun. Unlike Allred’s other art classes, sculpture and ceramics are three dimensional instead of two dimensional like drawing and painting. There’s some options to fill your fine arts credits.
“My favorite thing is having the kids think outside the box in a three dimensional realm,” Allred said. “Most kids can draw what they’ve been taught as kids to do two dimensional stuff.”
Students get really creative in sculpture and ceramics. Some have sculpted elephants, dolphins, trees, knights, or even tiki heads. In ceramics the students have made lots of masks, vases, and boxes. One student even made a knight helmet for their mask. Another project in ceramics is the whistle and students in the past have made ocarinas for it. The best thing about sculpture for some students is whacking the rock.
“You get to hit it really hard and it doesn’t break,” Andersen said.
