This week, we’re highlighting a project from Department Chair Debi Farber’s Methods & Materials class for first-semester students.
Debi Farber explains:
Clay is a versatile and organic medium, replete with history and folklore, that effortlessly documents each attempt to alter its shape. The fact that clay is three-dimensional offers the sculptor a unique opportunity to see things from multiple perspectives and manipulate and develop their environment. It is linked with primitive emotions and therefore fosters a deeply personal experience which can elicit pleasant or displeasing visceral responses.
Totem poles are symbolic depictions of a family or clan’s kinship, accomplishments, stories, dignity, and its rights and prerogatives. They serve as a family emblem, a reminder of who they are and what they stand for.
After participating in a brief meditation, students in the Methods & Materials class created animal representations of self in character and family members in the form of clay totem poles.