Alumni

Personal Statement: My practice investigates play, perception, and humor as pathways of resilience through crisis. A consistent exploration in my work is the therapeutic role of cartoons in assimilating psychologically complex experiences. 

The immediacy of drawing enables slippages between my self, material, and pre-lingual pictographs, manifesting residues from the interior and transformative realm of the imagined. By giving linework objecthood through clay, the emotional states that carried me through difficult experiences, such as hope and vulnerability, can be transmuted into dimensional symbolic catalysts.

The intent of my work is to show that cartoons and their pictographic origins have powerful cognitive effects related to language and emotion, and that craft has the ability to propose new standards of care.

Ava Igoe is a second generation Polish-Irish American raised and based in Chicago. She received a BFA with honors from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University (2017).

Since 2019, she has worked in public service administration and community engagement, where she coordinates arts programming for Chicago youth in the Teen Services department at Chicago Public Library.

Sophia Muys is an artist from the Bay Area in California. She conferred her Bachelors degree in Art and Art History from UCLA in 2022. Her practice, primarily figurative, is concerned with affect, gesture, and the pictorial border as site of exploration. She works in conversation with the Russian orthodox iconographic traditions and theological dialogues she grew up around, in addition to themes of cuteness, semiotic ambiguity, and the western art historical canon. 

Autumn Horwath is a sculptor working in clay, metal, wood, and fibers. She received a BFA in art education from Belmont University in Nashville, TN, then did a year of graduate studies in sculpture at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. She taught ceramics at a public junior high school in Utah and misses her rowdy students. Horwath was an Educational Fellow at the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts, and has shown work at James May Gallery, Var Gallery, Trout Museum of Art, and Racine Art Museum. 

Personal Statement: I always wanted to be a cowboygirl. When I would state this as a kid, my parents tried to correct me by saying (not asking), 'You mean a cowgirl.' 'No?' I would respond. 'A cowboygirl.'

In the 90s, cowboys were the real deal, they were the ones tearing up dust in western movies or riding bulls in the rodeo. Cowgirls were pin-ups on pastel colored advertisements. With my cowboy hat and cowboy boots I knew I needed to be taken seriously so I refused the paradigm.

Today, it would still be nice to be taken seriously, but I’ve lowered my expectations.

Christina Lee is an artist exploring the textures of human connection. Having lived in Korea and now based in the United States, her practice moves fluidly between environments, languages, and materials, expanding her sense of relational experience. Her work affirms that to exist amid change is, in itself, to be in relation. She is drawn to the discarded glaze, which carries traces of someone’s hope, failure, and the passage of time. From these remains, she constructs new worlds, transforming what has been left behind into something alive.

She approaches making as a slow conversation. Through trust, time, and uncertainty, forms take shape, and that very process becomes a record of how humans and the world continually shape one another.

Henry Tyson is a midwestern artist who navigates the functions, associations, and assumptions of the body, pottery, and the points at which they overlap. They ideate through the sonic and compositional qualities of the written word to convert sound to emotion. Emotion converts to form. They consider the word “functional” through the lens of queer figurative sculpture and the mechanical functions of bodies in their work. They posit queer intimacy as a counter to traditional views of sex and gender: is it not a basic function of the body to hold another? To love? To lust and experience pleasure?

Their work realizes comfort, confusion, grief, inner and interpersonal strife, and how we might explore these emotions with others. By blending the human form with functional pottery, they ask: if a body is indeed a vessel, may we choose what we are made to carry? What does my body hold and why?

Personal Statement: I am a ceramic artist whose work is both functional and sculptural dealing with ideas of identity, ancestry, and nature. My personal experiences as an African-American bi-racial woman in the US coupled with what I’ve learned about the lived experiences of others, notably through my work at non-profit organizations, inspire me to create art that conveys my perspective on the world or speaks to societal issues. I come from a privileged background and this has allowed me to see the many disparities in our society from a unique angle. As someone who takes up space where other Black women do not, while simultaneously being silenced in privileged spaces, I am driven to make ceramics more accessible.  

My work explores the relationship between the body, nature, and disruptive forces, inspired by my lived experience. What began as a goal to create a planter to hold my not-yet-potted houseplants evolved into an exploration of my ancestry, research on the history of how my facial features came to be, and a call to mindfulness. My work is an ode to Black womanhood and my forms often combine elements of the natural world, like plants, to celebrate Black hair in its natural state. The incorporation of plants in my sculptures not only represents the beauty, complexity, and diversity of Black hair, but also Black thought. I investigate how unnatural and disruptive forces like systems of oppression interrupt the beauty of nature, often creating alternative depictions of beauty.

Matthew Kaufman is a queer Jewish artist currently residing in Chicago, Illinois. Focusing on discreet parts of the body, Kaufman uses clay to create theatrical sculptures exploring conversations of humor and self-discomfort. By isolating and hyperbolizing body parts, he examines the different registers in which his body is taken up and given significance. The result is a compelling method by which Kaufman negotiates his own bodily insecurity and awareness and puts these affective states in conversation with his viewers. He received a BA in Studio Art and Psychology from Brandeis University.

Personal Statement: My work points to "artificiality." The process begins with a question. Even after having received art education for about 10 years in Korea, I always questioned the artificial process and wanted to get out of the typical process. So I started working by comparing the fish on display for sale to my life, which reminded me of what I felt and questioned all this time; living my life to meet other people's standards was not so different from packaged fish, so I had to get out of it. The representative work for showing the theme is Fish Market. Fish Market brings ordinary objects which viewers can see easily in their daily lives and which are transformed into artworks and placed in a special place called an exhibition hall. As a result it evokes artificial moments that viewers pass by indifferently in daily lives. In each artwork, artificial moments are created in the formalized processes of making fish and humans prepared to the needs of others, often suggesting a sense of helplessness. I was influenced by a philosopher named Zhuangzi. According to Zhuangzi, since not applying artificiality means leaving things as they are, artificiality should not be applied for any justification in order for all things to maintain their integrity. However, it is difficult to find anything without the touch of human artificiality in human civilization. The point of my work is to superficially create an artificial state, but paradoxically, to essentially pursue a natural state away from the artificial state.

Personal Statement: I have been comparing my making process to that of music making. Sometimes you make quiet music, improvise, or play loud rock. Currently, I am exploring functional ware while simultaneously making non-functional sculpture. This practice allows artistic freedom and the integrity to be able to change gears in order to play loudly or softly for each body of work.

Makayla Lindsay (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist living in Chicago. Her work deals with themes of emotional aggression, disembodiment, and dislocation. Subsequently, at times her work is the opposite, it is a search for peace, of consciousness, and the act of letting go. Makayla received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of South Florida in 2021 and her Masters of Fine Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.  

Rachel Heibel (she/her) is a ceramic artist based in Chicago with her MFA in ceramics from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Before moving to Chicago she began her practice at The University of Michigan where she investigated the intersection between sculpture and function, while incorporating aspects from her sustainability studies. She utilizes traditional processes of hand-building with clay to create objects that bring natural forms into indoor spaces. Her work is a representation of her making sense of the world around her through making. 

Personal Statement: I consider myself a multimedia artist but ceramics is one of the primary mediums that I‘ve been working with consistently from 2019 to now. The subject of my pieces is animals and flowers as representations of intense emotion and an exploration in abstraction. I’ve always been inspired by fantasy, mythology, folklore and horror in terms of how animals are portrayed and represented. I've always been interested in how animals are used to represent different types of ideals and morality important to the culture that resides near them despite animals not having those concepts in nature. I use that concept in my work with the animals becoming avatars to what emotions I want to convey in a form that is both foreign and unfamiliar. In terms of process, I do make hand-built pieces but most of my pieces have a thrown component that has hand-built elements made around it to create a full piece. I mostly glaze using low fire glazes. I use a spray booth for application and sometimes use stains, underglazes, or slips as an underpainting for the piece if I don’t want the clay body to show. I want my work to capture people’s attention with the color schemes I choose and the liberties I take with the forms. I want my work to feel alive and compel people to take a closer look at the detail of the surface treatment. I want to bring the internal to the external, to bring beauty to the grotesque and to connect with the audience in a way that cannot be conveyed with words.