Biography

I am a ceramic artist and art instructor at Yakima Valley College in Yakima, Washington. I have been exhibiting my ceramic sculpture for close to two decades and teaching nearly as long. I earned my MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2006 and moved to Yakima later that year to run the ceramic studio at Yakima Valley College and teach classes. During my time at YVC, our clay offerings have increased and we moved into a beautiful new building in 2015. I earned tenure in 2016 and took over as president of our local AFT-Y faculty union in 2019.

Though my full time teaching and union duties take up the majority of my time during the academic year (and then some), I have managed to get into my home studio consistently in the summers, breaks, and at odd times during the year. In February 2020, my husband completed my home studio remodel, just in time for me to use it for numerous video demonstrations and class meetings during the pandemic. The beautiful new work space at home, as well as a larger kiln and a pugmill make it easier to get into my studio and create. You can see my work here on my website, on my blog, or at Oak Hollow Gallery in Yakima, WA. You can also look for my upcoming exhibitions and events in Washington state and around the country. On my blog you can also check out my new studio, the YVC studio, and lots more.

I teach wheel-throwing and hand-building clay classes as well as the online Art History series at Yakima Valley College. I sometimes teach Design or Art Appreciation classes. During the pandemic, I have been teaching both Two-Dimensional Design and Clay 1: Hand-building entirely online.  In 2015, the YVC art program moved into a brand-new building, Palmer-Martin Hall. The first floor of the building houses the art studios, including a beautiful four-room ceramics studio with wheel and hand-building spaces, a ventilated glaze room, a kiln room with one gas and three electric kilns, a semi-outdoor kiln yard with raku and pit firing spaces, and a clay mixing and storage room. In 2017, our studio added a 3D Printer for clay. If you are interested in learning more about the Art Program at Yakima Valley College, click the link (you can also get my YVC contact info there). If you'd like to connect with the Art Club or Clay program directly, you can visit our YVC Clay Facebook, YVC Art Club Facebook and YVC Art Club Instagram pages (These have all been updated less regularly during the pandemic.)

While updating my website doesn’t happen regularly, I do update my blog reguarly. My blog is a great place to keep up to date with my events and shows and my newest work. I find that writing about my process, my classes, and my ideas helps me to keep track of what I’ve been up to and it helps me think through challenges I encounter in my teaching and in my own work. It’s also a fun way for me to share what I’ve been working on or what my students are doing. You can read about and see recent pictures of my work, my studio, my classes, my teaching, and work created by my students on my blog at racheldorn.blogspot.com. I would be happy to hear from you about my work, my process, my events, or other topics I write about or share images of here on or on the blog. If you’re more interested in techniques and how I work, you might enjoy seeing videos on my YouTube page. Though I mostly post video demonstrations for my students, the videos are mostly public.

Artist Statement: Abstract Sculpture

Up until fairly recently, my work consisted primarily of abstract sculptural forms. This work, which I am still creating, is inspired mostly by plant forms and aquatic life. The biological forms I look to for inspiration are at once familiar and strange. Forms derived from plants, removed from their original context, altered in color and size and sometimes presented in combination with other forms manage to surprise the viewer and offer different interpretations to different people, depending on the knowledge or experience they bring to the work.

I usually prefer bright colors and complex textures in this work. I consider my sculptural work to encompass freestanding sculptures as well as wall installations made up of many small bulbs or a variety of forms of different sizes. This work sometimes incorporates non-ceramic materials as contrasting textures or to create physical movements in the forms.

Artist Statement: Political & Social Themes

More recently, I have begun to incorporate more political/social themes into my work through my politics bulbs installations, my scream mugs that capture the mood of 2020, as well as COVID balls, mugs, and planters. This work is more figurative or representational and allows less room for interpretation. I started creating this body or bodies of work around 2016 in reaction to the political climate at the time and I have continued to be influenced by the pandemic and related political and social changes and challenges.

This work is more taxing mentally to create, which means that I find it more difficult to create during busy teaching or work times. But this work also requries a different way of thinking and working and planning, which has been an enjoyable challenge. Thus I have kept the scale of this work relatively small, either in installations or in functional forms.

With both types of work, the material and the process is important to me, as is the audience interaction and reaction. My glossy and highly textured surfaces, bright colors, swelling forms, and incorporation of mixed media, as well as physical movements, are all meant to invite touch. Often my work is specifically designed to be handled, whether it is functional pottery, sculpture, or installation.

Teaching Philosophy: Reacting to the Pandemic

I imagine that many people will discover that their teaching philosophies have undergone a dramatic change due to the pandemic. Or perhaps what we redisovered this year is that our teaching philosophies have always needed to be in flux to react to what we learn and new challenges we encounter, as well as changing technology and the needs of our students. I have been teaching the art history series entirely online since 2017. Moving the classes online required big changes, but those classes continued to go through significant changes as I learned more about online teaching, participated in ESCALA training, saw innovative things colleagues were doing, and when new tools became available.

My clay classes had also gone through significant changes in the years leading up to the pandemic. I moved lectures and demonstrations online, sometimes as supplemental options, sometimes to hybridize the classes so that students were able to prepare on their own time and spend class time more efficiently doing rather than watching demos. I saw impressive results through moving parts of the studio classes online. Students who wanted to were able to work ahead and students who missed class didn’t end up hopelessly behind.

Though I had taught art history classes online many time before March 2020, and I had moved pieces of classes online as supplements or hybrid options, I had never taught my studio classes entirely online. Teaching any studio class online presents unique challenges. But I believe that teaching three-dimensional media online has an additional layer of complexity and challenge, as it is more difficult to communicate ideas related to thickness, texture, weight, and depth in real space when you aren’t sharing real space together. Some of these challenges in understanding and communicating space also apply to drawing or painting classes where the goal is to recreate still lives or human bodies.

Moving the entire class online was a challenge in more ways than I could have originally anticipated. The first challenge was in putting together a studio kit the students could take home that would provide them the materials and equipment they would need to set up a home studio, but within the constraints of a budget that was designed with the expectation that tools, equipment and materials would be shared. The next challenge was that creating new or modified projects, with all the associated paperwork, explanations, example images, video intros and demos that could be done at-home was a lot of work. I was lucky that many video demonstration were already online, but throughout the year, especially in the first quarter, I kept discovering more and more ”little” things that I explained, showed, introduced, or had the students participate in during class for which I hadn’t thought to create an online analogue. An on-campus studio class is 2-3 hours a day, 2-3 times a week. During that time I am almost constantly demonstrating, correcting, answering questions, etc. Both the instructor and the students have 6-7 hours of non-stop showing, watching, and doing. Pre-pandemic, if I were to write down what we did in that 2-3 hour class, I might have three to five bullet points. Post-pandemic, I imagine I could write a 3 page list of what happened in that same time. Trying to move it online made me ever so much more aware of what was happening that wasn’t entirely conscious.

Check out some of the results of my student’s online studios here: Clay Pinch Projects and Slab Projects, Design Line Projects and Shape Projects.

Teaching Philosophy: Interactive lessons and Active Learning

Any class needs to be engaging and give students the opportunity for active learning. Studio classes that meet in person have an advantage, you might say, in that the entire structure of the class is designed to get students actively engaged in making art. Studio classes, like lab classes, begin with the expectation that students need to do, not just listen and watch. I believe that “lecture” based classes where students are learning about art history or art appreciation also need to involve active learning, where students have the opportunity to discuss, try, and do (though what they are doing might not be making art).

I’ve done a lot of work over the years to convert lectures in both my studio classes and my art history classes into interactive lessons that combine short videos, text with pop-up definitions, “knowledge checks” and activities that include identifying parts of an image, sorting images or ideas, and more. The tools for doing this work online have improved greatly in just the 5 years I have been teaching online. I also find that it is essential to give student an opportunity to discuss the ideas themselves. In both types of classes, students learn a great deal by explaining concepts themselves. During the pandemic, the casual studio conversations between peers had to be recreated online, but students mentioned that those conversations were really helpful for them to feel part of the class community.

Teaching Philosophy: Working with Clay

Working with clay requires students, very quickly, to develop an understanding of the physical and chemical processes that run the clay studio. I believe that students need to start with an introduction to the basic science and the fundamental reasons behind the directions given by the instructor.

Beginning level students need to be taught, and to understand, the drying process and the chemical change that happens during firing, turning clay into ceramic. Pottery students need to understand how the motion of the wheel can be harnessed to create a symmetrical form and how the forces they apply to the clay work with or against the natural tendencies of the clay. All students need to understand what causes the clay to crack, break or explode—and what they can do to prevent damage in their own work.

I think it is important for higher-level students, after their introduction to clay and glaze, to learn about glaze formulation and basic kiln firing. These students need to understand why glazes work they way they do in order to make informed decisions about their formal and aesthetic choices. Beginning students look to intermediate and advanced clay students for advice and support in the studio, thus it is important to me that these students understand the medium well enough to explain the basics to their classmates and to recognize how their actions can cause changes in the clay or the glaze during the firing.

A clay studio and classroom is made up of students with a mix of abilities and backgrounds. These students will influence each other, so it is imperative that the instructor set clear expectations for quality of work, behavior and responsibilities in the studio. Students in my classes understand that they will be challenged at their level. Students are urged to push themselves to explore the possibilities of an assignment once they have met the basic requirements. Once techniques have been learned, students are asked to focus on the visual relationships in the form, or the surface qualities or on their personal expression through larger groups of work.

I find that students learn best when they are actively involved in projects that challenge them and require them to plan their time. Students need to see that their choices in building their work, planning drying time, and applying glazes all lead to results that are not dictated by the instructor or a grade. The clay studio is a real life laboratory where mistakes can lead to breakage or glaze drips and good choices lead to strong work that is successful both physically and visually, and eventually, emotionally and expressively.

Ideally, the experience of making art from clay is about something broader than one class or one sculpture or vase.  It is about experimenting and learning from the clay and letting the clay process teach the student about himself as learner, a thinker and a maker.