When students registered for professor Diana Pancioli’s Beginning Ceramics course, none expected their work would be displayed in an art gallery.
The ceramic workings of Pancioli’s class were displayed for the Eastern Michigan University community as the Big Pots Show on Tuesday at the Ford Art Gallery.
“For many of these students, it’s their first time working with ceramics, and that’s why they’re so impressive,” said Pancioli.
The large terracotta pots were installed Monday. The work is the beginning for many students in the ceramic arts program.
“I decided on having the show because it was such a good class with so many good pots, and it seemed like the thing to do,” Pancioli said. “My students were free to carve the surface any way they wanted to, but the assignment was to make terra cotta storage jars similar to those made in 350 B.C. in China or first-century Rome.”
From Europe to Asia, Pancioli explained the terracotta pots served many purposes over the years.
“The earlier ones were used to store grain and for funerary purposes,” said Pancioli. “The clay we used went through a process where the finest particles are taken out which gives the clay a leathery sheen when buffed. It’s a first-century Roman technique.”
In a beginner’s class full of firsts, Michelle Lanthier is now one of few students who can say they’ve had art displayed at a college level.
“This is my first show at EMU, but I’ve been featured in high school art shows,” said Lanthier. “This isn’t my first pottery experience, but it is my first pot that’s been this large. I’ve never worked with something even half this scale before.”
These pots aren’t of the wheel-spun variety and it clearly shows by their size. Pancioli described it almost as an ongoing puzzle, adding piece by piece to achieve the gigantic size.
“The pots were made with the use of an extruder which was created in the 1960s,” said Pancioli. “It’s almost like a Play-Doh pumper where you pull on a handle and out comes these 3-inch-wide pieces of clay, called belts, that are 3/8 of an inch thick. These pots were built with those belts.”
This approach allows students to create ceramic pieces of artwork that won’t fit in their backpacks as they might have in a high school art class.
“A lot of ceramics classes start off with smaller pots but this process allows students to approach scale,” said Pancioli. “We also want to draw students to these classes and what better way to by showing students what they can do. It doesn’t take a lot of experience to work with these belts.”
The pots featured designs such as bones, fish, peacock, branches, turtles and even realistic Greco-Roman line drawings of ancient marathon runners and chariots.
“The inspiration for my pot was the second idea I came upon when I ended up grabbing some branches,” said Matthew Koegler, another student in the class. “I’ve taken classes from painting to 3-D design, but this is my first art show and my first time working with ceramics at the college-level.”
“This was my first time working with ceramics,” said Shawna Patterson. “I like turtles and since it was a really big pot I wanted to do something older-looking.”
“My inspiration for this pot came when I was thinking of ideas and I was wearing a shirt with a peacock feather,” said Lanthier. “I just took that idea and went from there.”
Some of the students felt pleasantly surprised by the quality of the final product of the rest of the class and even themselves.
“It was interesting to see what people came out with and everyone’s came out looking really cool,” said Patterson. “I actually shocked myself by creating something decent.”
“We were all beginners, I think, so considering that it’s quite nice how everything turned out,” said Ulrich Reinhardt. “The things you can do with ceramics as a beginner is impressive.”
A biology professor here at EMU, Reinhardt’s presence at the gallery was a surprising one. Many of his students would be more familiar with bumping into him at Mark Jefferson or Strong Hall. But as they say, things are not always as they appear. One might wonder, “What would a biology professor sculpt in his ceramics class?”
“I’m a fish biologist so I wanted to use something with fish for my design of course,” said Reinhardt. “I browsed the internet and found a design for a carp and just thought ‘this is it.’”
Though this was not Reinhardt’s first experience with ceramics, his enthusiasm about his fellow classmates’ work hints it won’t be the last.
“This is my first art class at EMU but I started working with ceramics last winter at the Ann Arbor Recreation and Education Center,” said Reinhardt. “It’s a lot of fun and I’d recommend it to anyone.”
The Big Pots Show will disappear as quickly as it set up shop, but the experiences of the students having their work displayed will not go away so easily.