The Goshen College senior art shows are approaching, with the first exhibition opening March 20 and the second on April 16. This year, the second show will feature only female artists.
Seniors Kat Columna, an art major; Hannah Clearwater, an art entrepreneurship major; Camila Pérez-Diener, an art education major and Kelsey Moore, an environmental science and art major, will display their work and explore themes connected to nature, beauty and the overlooked parts of everyday life.Every year, senior art majors present an exhibition of their final undergraduate work. Students spend months developing pieces that reflect their artistic interests and growth during their time at GC.
Sara Method, an associate professor of art and the chair of the art department, said that the way the groups formed this year felt natural. “It was beautiful, they just worked so well together and it was just all about the spirit of collaboration which I think is great,” she said. Clearwater focuses primarily on ceramics, creating large vessels that explore the relationship between beauty and environmental change. She described her concept as “the ugly and the beautiful.”
“It’s a play on the beauty and the mundane, but it’s about climate change and all my pieces have different color themes to go along with them,” Clearwater said.
While working in the studio, unexpected challenges sometimes become part of the creative process. “Last week I was trying to build one of my vessels and it cracked, so I trimmed it off like really short and made a new thing out of it,” Clearwater said. “I might put it in the show, but my favorite thing is when I mess up I try not to get rid of stuff. I try to work with a mistake. It’s kind of empowering to be able to mess up and still create something out of it.”
Moore will exhibit watercolor paintings that highlight beauty in ordinary places. Her work focuses on finding meaning in everyday scenes that people might normally overlook.
“A current piece that I did was a photo of a gas station, and just looking off into the distance. It’s just a place that you would normally drive by, but then capturing it in art and trying to bring some beauty,” Moore said.
Unlike artists who focus on a single medium, Columna chose to work across several forms, including painting, ceramics and printmaking.
For her, exploring multiple mediums reflects her future goals of being an art teacher, and not limiting herself to one medium. “Saying, ‘I just do ceramics,’ that’s not true. I am very interested in many different things and I want to try it all … my senior exhibit is a representation of that,” she said.
Her exhibition centers around nostalgia and personal growth. “I’m incorporating technology and art and nature and combining them, and I also like my favorite animals like jellyfish and so I’m incorporating that … creating paintings that have that. I’m also doing ceramic pieces that are the life stages of a jellyfish to talk about like how I’m growing and I have grown into the person that I am today,” Columna said.
Preparation for the exhibition includes a one-credit class where the art seniors meet with professors each Friday to critique and discuss each other’s work. Method and Tiffany Wyse-Fisher, assistant professor of art, shared about the encounters. “Kat, she’s doing a lot of painting and printmaking with Sarah, and she’s doing ceramics with me. So, I don’t see half of her show until Fridays,” Wyse-Fisher said.
The professors also collaborate with students as they explore new ideas and mediums. Method spoke about working with Pérez-Diener as she thought about creating a quilt. “I was like, ‘Yes, let’s do a quilt thing!’ It was really exciting,” Method said. “So we went to the library, we pulled books out. I had a Gee’s Bend quilt book in my office. We pulled that out and flipped through. We talked about how to put different colors together, planning ideas,” she said.
Although each artist works in different mediums, they share overlapping themes connected to nature and the environment. “We’re doing nature or incorporating nature into our theme,” said Columna.
Clearwater also reflected on how the artists examine beauty in ways that encourage viewers to look deeper. “It’s been really eye-opening to see the themes in our world that are typically hidden or seen as … beautiful things,” she said.
One of Clearwater’s pieces, “The Early Blooms of Spring,” explores the environmental impact of climate change. “It’s about cherry blossom trees and how they bloom a lot earlier and how birds that migrate are being affected as well. But we see that these bloomed trees are so beautiful, but we don’t know the real effects that is happening on our world.”
