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Professor Sue Whitmore has transformed an ordinary looking hallway into a visual experience featuring a year and a half's worth of interestingly shaped clay oddities.
Whitmore, an associate professor in ceramics, has more than 10 handcrafted ceramic pieces in the Humanities Center Gallery in Trinity Hall for her art exhibit "Cryptomnesia."
The title is for a phenomenon in which people believe they have had original experiences that were actually inspired by previous memories.
The title is fitting: each piece is fashioned after real objects that are so distorted they seem to become something based entirely out of the imagination.
"They are based on things that actually exist, whether it's the inside of a flower or some other biological form," Whitmore said.
Whitmore has spent more than a year in her studio apartment making them for the show. She specializes in using clay but will add other items such as rubber tubing to her pieces.
By using this method she hopes to create "things you might see out of the corner or your eye" and partially associate with something else, she said.
Although the professor has worked with 3D imaging and drawing in the past, the physical aspect of working with clay is why she prefers it, Whitmore said.
"You can actually touch it," Whitmore said. "You can pretty much create anything from nothing."
Create "anything" is exactly what she did. Each piece seems to have a space-age look with odd coloring and abstract shapes seemingly protruding from every inch. While one design looks faintly like a honeycomb, another one looks more inspired by a telephone. One of the purposes of these varied objects was to combine colors and textures that don't normally go together, Whitmore said.
"I'm really interested in colors," Whitmore said. "I like the aspect of these kind of hard things that look soft and these colors that look unnatural."
Although Whitmore does not plan every piece out before she begins it, a lot of thought goes into crafting her work.
Whitmore typically sketches the piece first then crafts it out of extremely fresh clay that she has sent from Maine. Each piece has to be carefully handled and put into a kiln up to six times so it can harden fully.
The gallery displaying "Cryptomnesia" worked out perfectly, Whitmore said. The area displaying the pieces is basically a hallway in Trinity Hall, but Whitmore thinks that it allows viewers to walk back and forth and take in the artwork as a whole.
Another benefit is that it extends her audience to those just passing through who might not typically stop to appreciate such abstract art.
Whitmore likes seeing students stop and discuss which pieces they like most.
"They walk in one door, by the time they get to the other they're usually
smiling or smirking or laughing out loud," Whitmore said. "I think that's a positive thing."
Whitmore's exhibit runs until Nov. 1 in the Humanities Center Gallery.
Matt White can be reached at mwhite@theorion.com
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