Hello, my name is Rochelle Martin, and I am interning at the David Owsley Museum of Art this summer. If you haven’t already guessed, I will be updating the blog during my time here about the events that are happening and the projects that I (and my fellow interns) am working on.

First, a little bit about myself: I am a senior at Ball State University where I am pursuing a B.F.A. in photography and a creative writing minor. I am exploring the Museum of Art as a possible career field, and learning all that I can while I’m here. As for what I’m working on, I am researching and writing for the forthcoming special exhibitions, photographing events and objects for archival purposes, and helping to develop a writing program that can (hopefully) be used by the faculty here at Ball State University.

But enough about me. There has been a lot going on, as many of you are aware. The new galleries will be finished in a few months, the Amidha Buddha has been moved to a new home in the gallery for Chinese and Japanese art, the special exhibitions are starting again, the Riverside entrance has been improved, and an elevator has been added to make the Museum of Art much more accessible. I know, right? That’s a lot. I’m excited to be here to witness all of it.

Like the new galleries, one of the special exhibits that I am working on will be opening in August and will be a solo show by the Danish ceramicist, Anders Ruhwald. It will be a formal exhibition about the perception of form and how the viewer’s perception of form changes by the material in which it is made. Ruhwald’s work is an ongoing investigation of form and is continued in this exhibit through the various materials: clay, glass, and wood.

There is also a collaboration going on as well between Ruhwald and BSU faculty and a small group of graduate and undergraduate students. Michael Hernandez (Glass Facilities Manager), the head gaffer, and Brent Cole (Associate Professor of Glass), the second gaffer, are working with the students to make Ruhwald’s totemic forms in glass. All of these artists are working independently in order to make this collaboration possible. Yet making Ruhwald’s forms in glass is not an easy task.

As an artist, much of Ruhwald’s work is in ceramics, and he has “won critical acclaim for his conceptual work that explores the boundaries of the ceramic medium as an idea and a material.” Currently, he heads the ceramics department and is an Artist-in-Residence at the Cranbrook Academy of Art since 2008. Ruhwald is known internationally for his skills and his work has been exhibited in many art museums around the world. Each of his forms are built and shaped, each carefully textured and glazed by hand. The kind of texture and sharp angles that Ruhwald can achieve with his clay is impossible when blowing glass, one of the several discoveries made in the collaboration. These forms are not about one medium being better than another, but they are about the perception of form a viewer has and how it changes when they can see the form repeated (though not quite the same) in clay, glass, and wood before them. Watch for the next post that will include images of the collaboration in progress and how it is coming along.