Senior Audrey Shewmaker places second at local ceramics exhibition
The theme for the exhibition was dreams, so every piece entered had something to do with a dream. Shewmaker’s piece was a fairy house that she made in Ceramics during her junior year with art teacher Tom Waggle. The piece, however, broke in the kiln. Shewmaker was originally going to throw it away, but continued the project by putting it back together and glazing it during an independent study with Ceramics teacher Carlynn Forst.
“[Waggle] told us to come up with a design for a worn down building. For some reason, I was drawn to the idea of a fairy house. I thought It would be a good gift for my little sister,” said Shewmaker. “During summer break, I came to school to check on it to see what it looked like after [Waggle] fired it. I saw it and parts of it had exploded in the kiln. I was absolutely devastated. I told my new teacher, Ms. Forst, to just throw it away, but she never did. After a month or two, she told me about a memory show that was coming up, and I knew I had to complete it. So I glued parts back together, I put glaze on it, and I applied moss and fake ivy vines to it to make it look overgrown,” said Shewmaker. “This off-and-on process took me less than a school year to complete.”
Shewmaker entitled the project It Looks Like We Made It, a nod to how Waggle “kept singing ‘It looks like we made it’ since it was the final day of school. It was the last time I saw him and he helped me build the piece, so I dedicated it to him,” said Shewmaker.
Shewmaker, who wants to study at Florissant Valley Community College next year to become a ceramics teacher, first took a ceramics class during her freshman year at North and has continued ever since.
Although she does photography, drawing and painting, Shewmaker’s art of choice is ceramics. Shewmaker said that “ [she] was really into art already so I decided to sign up for a ceramics class in high school.”
By Lauren Sparks, Centerspread Editor