Ceramics Teacher Shapes Students

One of the first activities Ellen Unt gives Ceramics I students at Palisades High is ‘sculpture go around.’ At tables of six, each student is given a small piece of clay, which they fashion into something that is added into a group sculpture. ‘It’s the first chance for them to feel the clay,’ Unt said. ‘The sculptures are not graded and I tell them I have no expectations. There is no pressure and they are not judged.’   This exercise also gives the teacher a way for her to begin understanding the individual personalities of her students. ‘Some kids are really timid, which you can see by the way they handle it,’ Unt said. ‘Others instantly craft something that has popped into their heads.’   Thoughtful, and surprisingly calm in the midst of five classes, each with 34 students, Unt has been teaching at PaliHi since 2005.   The Chinese duality of yin and yang comes to mind when speaking with Unt, who seems to have combined polar opposite subjects: thoughtful reflection and manual creation of objects.   Unt, an accomplished ceramist, feels that her class gives students something that they can’t get in a traditional classroom.   ’I notice for myself and for my students that working with the clay becomes a kind of meditation. They can sit for the entire period with intense concentration,’ Unt said. ‘Students also develop longer periods of concentration and focus. This helps their brains develop in different ways from an academic class.   The first graded project is a pinch bowl’a small piece of clay that students shape into a bowl. ‘Slowly we do more intricate projects,’ Unt said. By the end of the first semester, students have made a name plaque, a coil vase, a box and a mug.   When her students have completed assigned projects, they are allowed the freedom to design their own project. At a class in December, one clay piece waiting to be fired was a cartoon-figure bomb.   ’The first semester is a lot of skills-building, but the fun is the second semester,’ Unt said, noting the year culminates with each student making a ceramic model of his or her own hand. ‘They always turn out well; 80 percent of them are excellent. It is not an easy task because students are required to work with dimension and focus on spatial awareness.’   Surprisingly, Unt’s degree from UCLA was not in fine arts, but rather philosophy.   ’I was really excited about all these deep questions that I didn’t think people talked about,’ said Unt, who was also interested in Eastern religions and yoga. During that time she took ceramics at Santa Monica College and different adult schools because UCLA doesn’t allow non-art majors to take classes. Upon graduating in 1999, Unt originally thought she would teach at the college level, but she realized that university jobs are hard to come by and professors are required to publish, which she did not want to do, so she received a master’s degree and teacher’s certification from Cal State Northridge in 2004. For her master’s project she used thin sheets of pure porcelain, which symbolized the mind, and behind each one there was an image that represented an actual event, experience or person from her life. The tile was lit from behind.   ’The idea for the project stemmed from my philosophy background, in particular, Locke’s notion of identity, which validates the existence of a single person over time through the persistence of a causal continuity of memory,’ Unt said. ‘I thought it was interesting that throughout our lives, we have millions of experiences, and yet it is through these mere occurrences that we consciously or unconsciously latch on to particular ones that we hold on to and replay, resulting in our personal story.”   Undecided between teaching at the high school or college level (her mother, Katrin, was a middle school art teacher), Unt thought back to when she attended Cleveland High School in the San Fernando Valley and recalled the joy and freedom she felt in her first ceramics class.   ’Teaching high school became appealing because that’s when I first started to feel more confident,’ Unt said. ‘I thought maybe I could give that same sense of joy and purpose.’   After student teaching at Kennedy High School, Unt spent her first year at Birmingham High School, which was frustrating: ‘The kilns were always broken. I still had the kids working with clay, but they couldn’t take projects home because they were never fired.’ A year later she moved to PaliHi, where she had five electric potter’s wheels, one kick wheel and two kilns.   For every project, Unt gives students clear guidelines, and projects are graded in four areas: meets project requirements, craftsmanship, originality and aesthetics. Although Ceramics II is not offered, Unt allows advanced and AP art students to work in her class at their own pace.   ’The one difficult thing about teaching is that I haven’t had time to focus as much on my own projects,’ said Unt, who has exhibited in various galleries.   ’Recently, I was inspired to a new series of work, looking at the different personalities of the heart. The image came to me with a heart with trees and the veins of the heart are like roots that morph into the tree.’    An earlier series of Unt’s work was based on the bioengineering of food. She was bothered that fruits and vegetables were genetically manipulated using insect and fish genes for particular outcomes such as longer shelf life or protection from certain insects or diseases, which made it ‘easier’ on the food industry to make a profit.   She sculpted a tomato that was bisected by a fish, and fashioned a scorpion with a potato body. On the ears of corn the individual kernels carry the message: Herculex 1, engineered to control weeds. ‘The sculpture was based on my frustration of not knowing whether corn is corn,’ Unt said.   Unt thinks ceramics is important because it allows students to envision a project, work on it and produce a finished project.   ’The patience they develop is important,’ she said. ‘In an instant society with texting and microwaves, they learn that not everything is instant. One can’t rush clay.   ’Sometimes they have to make an object three or four times,’ Unt continued. ‘If their box cracks or breaks, then they have to figure out how to fix it, which means they also learn problem-solving and planning.’