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.
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