Students

Jacqueline Saepoff is a Chicago-based contemporary artist. She is currently an MFA Ceramics candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and her work has been featured in galleries across the country. Jacqueline experiences the living water in her material speaking directly to the water in her body, guiding her hand to the shape the material wants to become. Originally from the Pacific Northwest, Jacqueline’s practice promotes a harmonious relationship between modern humans and the natural world.

Personal Statement: 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.” Images come to me in feelings that only my hands know how to describe. I feel these things deep inside of me as a building and often sudden urgency, like I inhaled and have been holding my breath.

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 Carney is a second generation Polish-Irish American raised and based in Chicago. She is a current MFA candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (expected May 2026) and 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, and is currently a second-year MFA candidate in ceramics at SAIC. 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. 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 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.

Mal Gossett (b. 2002 Terre Haute, Indiana) is a first-year ceramics candidate at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They received their BFA in intermedia with a focus in ceramics and painting from Indiana State University. In their work, Mal relates clay to the body. They see the material as something soft and malleable—able to take on many forms before ultimately becoming more fragile in the end. The clay itself becomes a mode of transformation and fluidity, enveloping a sense of queerness. Calling on mystical creatures and the distorted human form to represent the fluid self, Mal's work delves into the polarizing experiences of plus-size and queer individuals living in the rural midwest.

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 (b. 1998, Davenport, IA) is a ceramic artist who earned her BFA in ceramics from the University of Iowa in 2022. She is currently based in Chicago, IL where she attends the School of the Art Institute of Chicago seeking her MFA in ceramics, as well as keeps a studio practice and works as a ceramics educator throughout the Chicago area. Her work addresses concepts of identity and reality by contemplating the dissonance of growing up Black in predominantly white spaces. Through humor, angst, and reclamation, she places the Black experience at the forefront to allow us to consider how we’ve managed to get to where we are today.

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.