The lights rarely go out in Seigfred's ceramics studios, where eight graduate students and five undergraduate majors work on projects ranging from potting to ceramic sculpture and installation art.
Every morning, Andrea Keys arrives at her studio in Seigfred Hall at 9 and usually does not get ready to leave until 12:30 a.m.
This is a really intense program
said Keys, a graduate student studying ceramics. Everyone within the department is doing something different with clay with a different approach to contemporary ceramics.
In her final year of the program, Keys is working on her thesis project, which uses life-sized ceramic sculptures to explore the way traumatic events in a family's past can create behavioral patterns passed on from parent to child.
I'm exploring memory and history and our desire to cling to certain identities and histories to form ourselves Keys said.
Keys creates fragmented monuments, such as an empty pedestal, to symbolize the parental figure in her installations, and the children are inspired by the German Hummel figurines, Keys said.
Basically I'm making a comparison between the Hummel and the monument and how they both kind of represent this same ideal of collective identity
Keys said. I'm interested in how these symbols become these generic ideas of history.
Some of the figures are a little taller than a child, but others can reach a height of almost seven feet, Keys said, adding that she fires her sculptures in an outdoor kiln that is about eight feet tall.
With 30 kilns of different sizes and firing styles, the OU ceramics program can support a broad range of experimentation, said Brad Schwieger, chairman of the program.
We have one of the biggest outdoor kiln facilities in the United States
Schweiger said.
But despite an average influx of 80 applications each year, the seventh-ranked program in the country could only accept three new graduate students and five undergraduate students this year because of limited studio space, said Alexandra Hibbitt, assistant professor of ceramics.-
holiday time ' very limited vacation time
he said. I expect them to be here all the time.
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