Ellen Schön

As a working ceramic artist, Schön exposes students to the wide-ranging professional practice of contemporary ceramics and sculpture. She challenges students to draw on a rich variety of historic multi-cultural ceramic traditions. Her technical demonstrations emphasize the expressive potential of both wheel-throwing and hand-building methods. Schön encourages creative exploration in her courses by asking students to reach beyond their first ideas, making iterative evolutions of form, and discovering diverse possibilities for material interpretation and manipulation. Students use the concrete evidence of their work to reflect on their artistic process, generate new ideas, and develop future work with clearer intention.