At the end of every school year, seniors in visual arts classes have the opportunity to display work to the community in summation of their arts journeys at Lakeside. Read their insights on their inspirations and processes below.
How long have you been taking an art class at Lakeside? What about your arts journey led you to this project?
Amber P. ’25 (AP): I’ve been taking Drawing and Painting for all four years of high school. One thing that I think Lakeside does particularly well with their visual art programs, specifically Drawing and Painting, is that they make sure to expose us to a really wide range of different media. I had never used ink for anything other than calligraphy before the ink landscape project in Intermediate Drawing and Painting, and it ended up being the medium that I centered my whole show around.
Mac D. ’25 (MD): I feel like a lot of my art journey has been improvised. I feel like a lot of it comes from making mistakes and working out of it. A lot of the pieces I made last year either cracked in the kiln or there was a mishap or something, and I just kind of went with it. I made it part of the project. I think a lot of mistakes happen because clay is so fragile, and it’s so natural that, of course, you can mold it, but sometimes it just does what it wants to do. So a lot of my inspiration comes from mistakes that I’ve made. My most recent fascination has been these faces that are kind of grotesque; I really like faces. I really like exploring the different features – you could really make a nose look like anything, and it will still look like a face. I did an English project that inspired my final project that was about outside forces, and society implanting these monsters.
Reagan R. ’25 (RR): I’ve been in ceramics for three years. I took it freshman year, I took it sophomore year, and then I took it this year. But I knew that whatever I was going to do for my senior art project, I wanted it to be different, and I wanted it to have meaning – not just in the piece itself, but to me and to everybody else who saw the piece.
I was kind of playing around with the idea of animals on Pinterest. And I don’t know, I was worried that it would feel like a little too cliche at first; animals as a senior projects seemed a little basic. But the more I thought about it and the more I focused in on specific pieces, I realized the variety of inspiration I could derive from the theme itself.
What other projects and artists are you inspired by?
MD: I’m actually really inspired by Reagan. She always has meaning behind all of her work. I think that’s really cool because a lot of my meaning comes from doing the work first and letting what happens happen. I don’t know. I let the clay leave me. And then I figure out what it means for me. I think it’s really special that Reagan creates in her mind the message she wants to give through her piece and then creates something that really targets an audience. I’m also really inspired by Leah Aegerter ’13. She graduated a few years ago. She came back, and she worked on a project in the studio while we were doing our final projects. She makes her own paper and uses it as a medium to do her projects. It’s an organic vessel, so that’s also an inspiration to me.
RR: For the cow, I took inspiration from a poem by Laura Gilpin, called The Two Headed Calf. For the cake, I took inspiration from the French Revolution and the “Let them eat cake” quote from Marie Antoinette (which I know she never really said). And then for the dog that I’m making now, I’ve taken a lot of inspiration from Phoebe Bridgers. She says, “I’ll wait for you like a dog with a bird at the door.” I think I’m attracted to the idea that writing is a fluid thing, and I don’t think ceramics is necessarily a fluid thing. I think there’s an air of permanence to them, but I like the idea that the two can be interchanged in some ways, and that I can use something that somebody’s written down and make a real life replica of that that I can touch and feel.
Considering the poem and Marie Antoinette, how did you choose those two as references and did you see any common themes between them? Why those two specifically?
RR: I always wanted to make something that I think subverts the expectations of people. And I remember hearing something about how Marie Antoinette, at the time of the French Revolution, was 16 years old and she was on the throne so young, and a lot of people blamed her for the state of the French monarchy when she had just taken power. I thought that idea was interesting, and so I made the cake as her 16th birthday cake. If you look at the cake, it’s falling down, it’s collapsing in on itself. Whenever I make something, I never want it to be a stationary idea or have a stationary meaning, even though that’s what I make it with. I always want my viewers to kind of grapple with what it means, what it could represent.
What influenced how big you made each piece? Was the abstract depiction of a ship meant to be the centerpiece?
AP: A lot of it was just utility and necessity. For example, the small portraits that I made were part of a full-class project where we had to make a series of paintings at a 1 piece per class period pace, so I knew I needed to work at a much smaller scale to meet that time constraint. For the ship piece, I was working with larger tools (like squeegees and sponges), so I knew I needed to paint at a much larger scale in order to make that work. That’s probably my favorite part of the artistic process — setting constraints and challenges for myself and seeing how they affect the final piece.
To answer the second part of your question, the ship wasn’t originally meant to be the centerpiece of the show, but I do consider it to be that in hindsight. In a lot of ways, the ship doesn’t mesh with the rest of the showcase, because the “brush” strokes and abstract shapes that make it up are much less intentional and more up to chance than the miniatures that I displayed it next to. In that sense, the contrast between the ship and the other paintings did make it a focal point of the show.
I don’t see faces a lot, especially not in ceramics. Does your inclusion of them have anything to do with you reflecting yourself in your work?
MD: I think so. What’s funny is that I’ve tried to make a self-portrait, and I hated it. I just could not do it because I was finding every single imperfection in my face. It was just hard to make myself in clay. I love making random people. I like to have an audience see themselves in a piece. There was a piece a while ago where I did a ton of different faces that had very different characters. I liked that someone might be like, “Oh, that’s kind of like me. I see myself in that.” I just really like to make pieces that let other people see themselves. I don’t necessarily like to see myself, although it’s very influenced by my experience.
The cake was so big, especially compared to the other ceramics pieces. What kind of work goes into creating a piece as large as that, and did you always want it to be that big when you were starting out?
RR: Yeah, absolutely. So the cake, I want to say, took me five months. Resilience is the wrong word, but it’s hard going through half of your year in one class, and you’ve only made one thing. So I kept making sure that whatever I was making, I loved, which was the key in starting out with the cake. How I made it, technically wise: I cut the base of each layer, so it was tilted. And then I piped the frosting on with an actual piping bag. I put clay into the piping bag, mixed with water, and then I could just pipe it on, which is pretty cool. When I was building it, it looked a lot bigger, because clay shrinks 15%. I always make something and I’m like, “All right, this is the perfect size,” and then it’ll shrink so much afterwards.
Is there anything you’d want to add on? An artist statement?
RR: I guess, you were asking about how the cow and the cake are connected. I picked the cake to be a part of the project actually pretty late into my showcase. I realized that I didn’t have enough pieces for the showcase itself. But the way that I ended up connecting it to my artist statement was through the scene of consumption: The showcase was called “Eat or Be Eaten”. And in some ways, Marie Antoinette was consumed by the French public, but in some ways, she was also a consumer, and she perpetuated a lot of class and power dynamics that eventually led her to being overthrown. In the same way that the cow was inspired by the poem that talks about him being consumed: You don’t know if you yourself are like the cow being consumed, or if you’re the human in that scenario, and you are the consumer. So I wanted to play with the idea of predator and prey, consumer and consumed, and again, to eat or be eaten, which seems very black and white, but I don’t necessarily think it is in the world that we live in.
Why did you choose to take two arts throughout high school? How have they influenced each other?
MD: Well, we automatically did ceramics in middle school; art wasn’t split up into painting, drawing, etc. So I did drama as my extra art. And I just really liked both of them, and I wanted to experiment with them. I also wanted to make sure that I stayed true to myself, and I did the things I wanted to do in high school and didn’t change my passion. I just kind of made it a priority for me. And there were a lot of people who helped me do that because they saw my vision, and they saw what I needed to do.
What was it like doing the drama showcase and the arts show so close to each other?
MD: Stressful. Really stressful, I will say. We all kind of, especially in ceramics, got stressed at the end with deadlines because in ceramics, you have to get it fired by a certain date for you to be able to glaze it and then fire it again for the senior show. So there’s a lot of deadlines that need to be met for you to make the thing. That was really stressful. The drama showcase was less stressful because I felt like it was more just having fun with the cast and just showing everyone what we love and how we love each other. I also really thought it was cool how both things were so senior-led and collaborative. In ceramics, the group that went together all talked about how we were going to organize the gallery and who was going to go where. That was really cool to collaborate on. We kind of shared what we loved about each other’s work and it was just really fun to do. And in drama, everything was collaborated on and really felt like it was our work being done.