Many Winter Study courses offer opportunities for students to experiment with a wide variety of materials and tools under the guidance of practicing artists. Some classes practice classical skills such as drawing, but many professors choose to teach with unconventional media. For these instructors, the materials they work with — ranging from textiles to glass — have helped define their creative processes.
Former Professor of Chemistry Jay Thoman ’82 has taught “Glass and Glassblowing” every Winter Study since 2000. Thoman told the Record that his medium still provides him ample room for experimentation even after over two decades teaching the course. “The glass itself doesn’t have as many limits as you might think,” he said. “The limits are due to like, ‘Can we get a big-enough flame?’”
Though glass is versatile, Thoman said, it demands patience and dedication. “In the first week [of the class], it’s downright dangerous because people don’t know what they’re doing,” he said. “And in the last week, it’s delightful, because people make things that I never would have expected.”
Despite his admiration for the innovative final projects, Thoman said that he finds that simply witnessing his students’ creative processes is the most rewarding part of his teaching experience.
In “Drawing Science,” interdisciplinary artist Lauren Levato Coyne teaches students to draw from direct observation of natural materials such as plants and taxidermy.
Levato Coyne’s background as a journalist informs her artistic practice. “Whether I’m writing or I’m painting, I’m telling a story,” she said.
Reflecting upon shortening attention spans in the industrialized world, Levato Coyne lamented the lack of moments in day-to-day life where time slows, stops, or expands. She encourages her students to take their time observing their subjects. “Drop into a different somatic space [where] three hours go by, and you raise your head and it [feels] like five minutes,” she said.
Levato Coyne acknowledged, however, that any attempt to capture the ever-decaying natural world through sketching confronts an inherent time limit. “We do a lot of timed exercises,” she explained. “We sometimes move very quickly, and that just gets rid of that preciousness that you’re carrying around… These specimens might not be here next week, so they [have] to take what information they can.” This limitation informs Levato Coyne’s creative process, prompting her to capture the most essential aspects of the subject and ask herself, “How do I look at this quickly? How do I understand: What’s the most important part about this species or specimen?”
Levato Coyne welcomes this contradiction. “In that confusion, something creative bubbles up,” she said.
Senior Lecturer in American Studies and English Cassandra Cleghorn grapples with a similarly complex relationship to time in her course “Remnants: The Social Life of Sewing.” In her course, students explore a variety of textile crafts, many of which Cleghorn traces back — generation by generation — to the practices of mothers in her family.
Cleghorn creates long-lasting items from natural fabrics, which she said she sees as a way of resisting fast fashion. The act of creation also carries narrative significance for her. “If I make an object [and] I put my initials and the date on it, then suddenly there’s a record,” Cleghorn said. “I put my fingerprints on it in a more explicit way… It becomes a way to tell a story as well.”
Story and legacy exist within the medium itself, Cleghorn said. “There’s also some kind of life in those fibers — or death,” she said. “I want to sew with something that feels like it’s life-giving to me as a maker and to the person who’s going to be encountering it.”
“If the point was just to have an embroidered bag, you could go to Walmart and find one that was pre-made,” she said.
