Abstract
This thesis examines my ceramic practice as an aesthetic, material, and pedagogical inquiry rooted in play, imperfection, and embodied experience. Working primarily with slab-built porcelain and stoneware, I create sculptural forms that use bold color, pattern, and gesture to explore the relationship between structure and improvisation. My work embraces awkwardness, humor, and material instability as generative forces, positioning joy and improvisation as both a formal strategy and a mode of resistance. Drawing from the educational philosophies of Friedrich Froebel, the Bauhaus, Black Mountain College, and John Dewey, this thesis situates making as a form of thinking and learning through doing. These pedagogical frameworks intersect with my personal history and feminist influences, including the work of Niki de Saint Phalle, Judith Scott, and Amy Sillman, whose writing on awkwardness provides a critical lens for understanding vulnerability, sincerity, and embodied risk in artmaking. The thesis focuses on five interconnected bodies of work: the Weavers , large wall-based ceramic collages constructed through weaving and layering slabs; the Waves , curved slab forms that can be endlessly rearranged into shifting compositions and spatial relationships; the Noodles , ribbon-like sculptural forms that function as drawings in space; the Weirdos , a series of small- and medium-scale unglazed and glazed sculptures that investigate the structural and expressive potential of slab forms; and the Smashers , flat wall-mounted sculptures composed from saved ceramic scraps that are cut apart, reassembled, and transformed into new configurations. Together, these works form a continuum of experimentation that foregrounds process, material negotiation, repetition, and acts of recombination as sites of discovery. Through this research, I argue that imperfection is not a failure of form but evidence of life and awareness. By prioritizing tactility, color, and play, my practice challenges conventional hierarchies of refinement and control in ceramics. Scrappy and Happy ultimately positions joy, awkwardness, and curiosity as essential tools for artistic inquiry and as pathways toward creating work that is honest, resilient and life affirming.