OFA CERAMICS PROGRAM
Student Voices: How Clay Makes Culture, History and Community
Christopher
Nugent, Ph.D. candidate, East Asian Languages and Civilizations
My time at the OFA Ceramics Program has been some of the best I have
spent at Harvard. While I had had no previous experience with clay, I
had long
admired the ceramics of China and Japan and wanted to try my hand at
the potter’s wheel. With most ceramics classes consisting of a
mix of beginners and advanced students, I found I learned not only from
my instructors
(who have always been excellent), but from other students as well. I
soon found that much of my free time was being spent at the studio. But
rather
than taking away from my academic work, my time at the studio actually complemented
it. The chance to use thought-processes different from those I used in my academic
work made that work seem fresher and
more exciting.
The Ceramics Program also allowed me to experience material and artistic culture
in a way I never had before. By actually working with the same types of processes
and materials that potters from different cultures have used for millennia, I
gained an understanding of artistic production that I would have never found
in books alone.
Gregory Valiant ’06, mathematics concentrator
My college decision was between Harvard and Stanford. From among many
factors distinguishing the two, the decision came down to ceramics facilities.
Stanford
had no ceramics studio on campus, whereas Harvard had a well-known studio attracting
many artists whose work I greatly respect. I am grateful that I have been able
to continue my interest in ceramics at a studio with such resources—human
as well as material.
Last fall I learned a great deal from the people who were there. Yary Livan,
a visiting artist from Cambodia, was often there Friday nights working into the
morning and always willing to chat or answer questions. Denny McClaughlin, a
production potter from Minnesota, was also extremely generous in explaining and
demonstrating the technique he uses to throw large forms in multiple stages.
The few conversations I’ve had with Makoto Yabe concerning his surface
treatments and glazes have been truly inspiring. Pam Gorgone taught me how to
fire pieces in kiln firings designed for special fuming effects.
I cannot imagine any other studio in which there is such breadth and depth of
knowledge.
Ruth Craig ’04, religion concentrator and Ceramics Program
student staff
member
The first weeks and months of my relationship with ceramics were physical—learning
to wedge clay to get air out, attempting to center spinning globs of clay on
the wheel, feeling the growing steadiness in my own arms as I slowly raised the
walls of a cylinder, and gaining a sense of when I needed all my strength and
when the lightest touch would do.
Working with clay relieves stress but is also demanding physically and mentally—it
combines physical muscle memory, mental problem solving, and what I can only
describe as the cultivation of an aesthetic sensibility.
In the last two years the Ceramics Studio has come to mean even more to me. It
is a community of incredibly diverse practitioners: undergraduates, graduate
students, Harvard faculty and staff, professional artists, community members,
PhDs, homesick freshmen, grandmothers, and parents with a few hours a week to
spare. Professional artists are also part of the community.
I have seen how ceramics creates, sustains, and reinvigorates community. I have
witnessed the back and forth interaction of history, anthropology, religion,
and art. I have been present at that single focused moment when past and present,
academician and artist, tradition and modernity, physical and mental intertwine
as the potter lays her hands on a shapeless mass of clay and gives it form.
Christopher Adams ’94
During his residency at the Ceramics Program this spring, Adams will
give presentations
in several classes.
Throughout my undergraduate studies at Harvard in evolutionary biology and my
graduate studies at Columbia Medical School in human anatomy, my sculptural works
have played on biological concepts—speciation, convergence, mimicry—to
generate aesthetic novelty and to pose questions about form in the natural world.
One series originated with a single six-legged piece that lost a limb while being
loaded into the kiln. The accident reminded me of an evolutionary truth—that
form in the natural world is shackled to the past, with each species being merely
an evolutionary variant upon a theme established by its ancestors.
I am greatly indebted to the Ceramics Studio, where I received my initial instruction
as an undergraduate, and continued my explorations while working in Cambridge
in my years following graduation.
The nice thing about having other occupations—many geared necessarily to
the prosaic business of earning enough to pay the rent—is that my art is
forever changing, absorbing life’s other offerings.
