Students

Personal Statement: I am interested in flipping the power dynamic that exists between artist and material; rather than acting as master and manipulator, I prefer to collaborate with my medium and allow the voice and agency of the material to show through. Inspired by my mystical Jewish upbringing, as well as my lifelong exposure to holistic and ayurvedic principles, I interpret an urgency in my body, similar to an inhaled and held breath, as a nonverbal communication that I am having with the material. I experience the living water that is in my material to be speaking directly to the water in my body, guiding my hand to the shape the material wants to become. 

Water holds secrets and truths and is willing to share them with anyone who will listen. My practice is one of listening. I listen to the material, I listen for whatever truths it wants to tell me today, and I listen for what it wants to become. I do this by touch, by hearing the material whisper through my nerves and veins, “notice this” “I want to be bigger/smaller/smoother in this spot.” I feel these things deep inside of me as a building and often sudden urgency, like I inhaled and have been holding my breath.

Much of my work is along the theme of return by way of healing and vice versa. There is a visiting, where I am an observer, partially removed from the experience of living, just here to see what this life is about, and there is a returning, to truth and to who I am, where I come from, and why I am here. My intuitive carving and gestural mark making lead to truths. The final result often appears to be abstracted ideas of what humans consider sublime or natural, but what is true about them is their genuineness. They are not representations of the objects they resemble, but objects themselves that have the effect of often tricking the viewer into seeing a realistic representation of something familiar, when in fact the realness they are attracted to is the life and eternal truth emanating from the genuineness of the gesture. The piece itself is quite abstracted, in that it is made up entirely of gestures and is quite different from the natural object the viewer thinks they are seeing. I trust the material to guide my hand to the mark it wants to have. The gesture is loving and generous.

Ava Carney is an interdisciplinary artist and ceramicist interested in investigating play and perception as pathways for resilience. In her practice, clay enables slippages between self, material, and object via its mutability and manifests artifacts from the interior and transformative realm of the imagined.

Ava received a BFA from the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University in 2017. She is based in Chicago and a current MFA candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC). She has held residencies at the Watershed Center for Ceramic Arts, Cité Internationalé des Arts, the Chicago Park District, and YoungArts. Ava has received awards from the Kosciuszko Foundation, the Nova Institute for Health, and YoungArts.

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

Sophia Muys (she/her) is an interdisciplinary artist from the Bay Area, California. She is interested in how figural work can explore the performance of selfhood. Her practice often responds to representations of femininity in traditionalized forms of portraiture, primarily as found in the history of Western art.

Sophia earned a BA in Art with a minor in Art History from UCLA in 2022, and has since worked as an artist in Los Angeles and the Bay Area. 

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. Currently she is a MFA Candidate in Ceramics at the School of the Art Institute Chicago. 

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 (she/her) is a ceramic artist currently based in Chicago, IL. She earned a BFA in Ceramic Art from Kyunghee University (South Korea) in 2021. From 2021 to 2023, she served as an assistant curator at Gallery Kabinett (South Korea), gaining extensive experience in exhibition management. She is currently an MFA candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Through her ceramics, Christina Lee explores a deep reflection of her inner essence, shaped by both intrinsic energies and external influences. Her recent work, The Columns (2023), is inspired by the ever-changing abstract emotions she experiences. She translates these feelings into tangible, physical forms represented by ceramic columns. Utilizing the dynamic interplay between clay and glaze, where contingency and permanence coexist, Christina aspires to deepen her understanding of her inner world and communicate this understanding to the broader world. Her artwork offers a fresh perspective on interpreting the inner and outer realms of individuals.

As a queer and self reflective artist, Henry Tyson (they/them) seeks processes and mediums that record and bolster the questions they ask of others and themself. The malleability of wet clay and the permanence of its fired state have directed Tyson through investigations of queer embodiment, what it means to inhabit a body, how we move within our forms, and how they move us. Henry finds sculpting clay profoundly tactile and gratifying; the practice affords the artist agency over the forms and bodies they create. As a nonbinary person who often feels disconnected from bodily experiences, agency is refreshing. Using their hands to shape a body is intimate and technical; knowing that their thumbprint with the right pressure and angle creates an anatomically convincing xiphoid process is exhilarating and euphoric. Tyson focuses on figurative studies—never working from live models and rarely from reference images—to learn about their own body. Clay has taught them that human bodies do not have templates; they fold and bend and twist and differ and break. Tyson explores the contrapposto and classical forms through a queer lens to ask why we gender physical characteristics. The artist encourages the viewer to be similarly inquisitive, and often omit faces or heads in their art so one may project their own feelings and questions onto it. Tyson's works ask the viewer: how may we question our assumptions about bodies? How do we feel about our own?

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.

Personal Statement: By morphing my physical appearance throughout my work and creating a space for it to exist, I find comfort in my multitudes, and I find pride in the uncertainty and fragility within me. One moment I can be so sure of myself and by the next I am someone else. I am often too much of something, too little of something else, but never exactly what I think I am supposed to be. Through my work I delve into my relationship with my body, gender, and how they impact my place in the world. Clay is malleable, it lets me mold it anyway I like but is much more fragile in the end. I have learned to embrace the unknown and uncertainty that comes with clay, and I apply those lessons to my self-image. I embody these traits, and I become the clay as it becomes a vision of me. On the other hand, within my paintings I am able to connect characters and symbols, I am able to tell stories and build a world.

Sena Park was born and raised in South Korea. Her multidisciplinary practice centers on ceramic-based sculpture, expanding into digital drawing, video, storytelling, ready-made objects, and traditional Korean techniques such as mother-of-pearl inlay (jagae), alongside diverse material explorations.

Park focuses on the complex, interconnected nature of contemporary life. Her work reflects a shift from seeking tangible solutions to embracing the uncertainty and entanglement of the present. Through this lens, she explores the dual nature of society—chaotic yet hopeful.

By merging media experimentation rooted in traditional craft techniques with narrative forms, Park creates sculptural environments that hold space for contradiction and complexity. Her process is grounded in the belief that adaptation, not control, is key to survival in today’s world. Through material and conceptual layering, she investigates how we navigate fragility, resilience, and connection in uncertain times.

Janiece Maddox (she/her) (b. 1998, Davenport, IA) is an interdisciplinary artist who earned her BFA in ceramics from the University of Iowa in 2022. She is currently based in Chicago, IL where she keeps a studio practice as well as works as a ceramics educator throughout the Chicago area. Her work addresses concepts of her identity and reality by contemplating the influence societal institutions have on the way we think about race, culture, and humor. 

Personal statement: My work blends personal experiences and learned narratives, drawing heavily on my upbringing as a pastor’s daughter. Growing up, I was comfortable with the Christian teachings I was immersed in, but in high school I began to have doubts. I wrestled with predestination, free will, why a sovereign God allows pain, and women’s roles in the church. While I attended church at my parents' request through high school, I vowed to not return after I graduated.

After a traumatic event my freshman year of college, I sought comfort and joined a campus ministry. Months later, the trust I built with the campus minister was betrayed. I was shamed for my life choices, and my intentions were questioned. The minister apologized only to absolve himself of guilt. This breach of trust drove me to stop going to church again.

In response, I turned to my ceramics course and began to use clay as a healing tool. I started making work to process my faith—the good, lovely, bad, and painful. Clay is the most natural, comfortable medium to me. Its flexibility mirrors the fluidity of my faith and allows for revision and grace in the making process. I use earthenware that feels raw and bodily, coated in white slip, like adding skin to each piece. Much like tattoos, illustrations carved through the slip embed permanent storytelling imagery into the work. This reflects how deeply ingrained religion and its stories are in me, and how the consideration of these things is a part of my daily life.