Ralph:
My name's Julie Ralph.
I'm a senior at Stanford.
I'm a Math
and Computational Science major,
and I'm the President
of the Ceramics Club this year.
And last summer
I did a project where I tried
to integrate marine biology
and ceramics.
I think that what I love
the most about marine life
and why I like doing things
based on that
is that it's so different
from what we think
of when you think
of an animal or a plant
or any sort of living creature.
And I think it's great
that there's these animals
that are genetically identic
and grow together
and yet have
these different functions
within the colony.
So I'm just
kind of amazed by them.
Going down to Hopkins
was a big part of it,
and we spent the first part
of the day
looking at things
in tide pools
just with the naked eye.
And then went and brought
some of the stuff
that we had seen in the tide
pools back to the lab
and got out some microscopes
and put it in slides
and started looking at it
and poking it.
There's a lot of beautiful forms
in marine life,
and a lot of it
is very difficult
to put into ceramics,
because so much of it
is about tentacles
and gossamer strands
and really flowy things
that you can't capture directly
in something
that's gonna be very clay
and very hard
and not mobile.
So what I made
was obviously not
a picture of the animals.
It's very much just inspired
by their
very interesting shapes.
I guess the bryozoa
might be my favorite piece,
and they have both
an outer shell
and a very complicated
inner soft creature,
which is super interesting,
because, you know,
they are basically
one big gut
that takes in food
and spits out food.
For those, I had
a fairly clear sense
that I wanted to make
something that had to do
with the outer shell,
and I wanted to capture
their very geometric way
of growing
next to each other.
They have a very tiled pattern
that I knew
that I wanted to capture,
so I wanted to make
a bunch of pieces
and put them all together.
Ceramics starts
with a bag of clay,
which is fairly wet,
fairly plastic
and can be molded
and stuck together
and basically the drawing board
for everything.
Most of my pieces
were thrown,
which means that they're
made on a wheel spinning,
so they're
gonna be symmetric
when they first come off
the wheel,
and then I'll do things
to alter them.
I think
the last big moment for me
was when I had
everything glazed,
and I put it into the kiln,
and I had filled up
the entire kiln
with my own pieces,
which was really cool
to see.
It was really great for me
to see everything
at an exhibit,
to see it
with professional-looking lights
on it
and in a display cabinet
and sort of glimmering
and all set up together.
Because a lot of my pieces
are colonies
and they're separate pieces,
it was really nice to see them
all laid out together at once,
which I had seen
before the reception.
And I like having it
on display.
I think it's important for me
that people are able to
see it,
so that was real nice.
woman:
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