Students taking time to ‘get it right’ and ‘awaken senses’

Mt. Hood’s Student Exhibit continues in the Visual Arts Gallery through June 5.

The exhibit features paintings, ceramics, sculptures and pieces done with other mediums completed during the current school year.

Art major Ashley Le Gore has a number of pieces on display, her top pick being a mermaid sculpture she worked on during fall term. “The mermaid has been the most challenging piece that I’ve worked on ever, so it’s definitely my favorite,” she said.

She started work on the mermaid in Nathan Orosco’s sculpture class and in a few independent study classes.

The biggest challenge was its design, she said. “I was going by the seat of my pants in the beginning, but then, once I took the design class (with Mary Girsch), I realized that design-wise, it’s something that needed to be changed, so I ended up having to do things like cut off her arm and remake it and change some of the design of her body.”

It was important for Le Gore to be satisfied with the piece. “It was either ‘Do it right, or get it done right away,’ and I was like, ‘I might as well take the time to do it right,’ ” she said.

Le Gore also has two woodcut prints on display that she did in Georganne Watters’s printmaking class. “It’s very time consuming, but a great process to learn how to do,” she said.

One is a horse “that’s a black-and-white design, so I made the design and then printed it,” she said. The second is a goldfish, a reduction print that Le Gore described as a process where “you carve away, after you print… and so it took a long time because there’s a lot of colors in it.”

Le Gore also has a ceramic vase that is a glossy “tree stump that has baby faces growing out of it,” she said. The vase was made in an independent study class with ceramics instructor Joe Davis.

Before she realized art was pulling her in, Le Gore was attending Mt. Hood to study nursing, after being a veterinary technician for 20 years. “After a couple of terms,  I decided to give that up [and] become an art major because that was  my calling.

“It helps to have four really inspirational teachers (Davis, Girsch, Orosco and Watters) that… really took me under their wing and guided me,” she said. “Mt. Hood is really lucky to have those teachers.”

Having ideas for her art pop up during sleep is how Le Gore knows she found her true calling, she said. “I think when you start getting woken up in the middle of the night with ideas about a piece that won’t let you sleep, and you have to get up and sketch that out and figure that out or work on that piece, then you know you’re on the right track.”

Veteran potter Zina Starr has four different pieces of work on display. There is a piece that consists of four separate parts sculpted out of cast glass, a cast glass sculpture, and two different ceramic pieces.

Starr’s personal favorite is a piece with four components that depict different elements: wind, water, fire and earth. “My concept of the spirit totem is kinda like the Native American totem — it’s an object that has the essence and spirit, so these are all elementals,” Starr said about the mystical influence of her work.

“I’m looking at them as modern artifacts, taking the concepts of my primitive ancestry, looking at them and saying ‘Okay, if I was (around) back then, what would I make now? How would I do it?’

“Maybe back in the day, I would have done it out of clay, but these are modern artifacts,” said Starr about mixing her heritage with modern items.

Starr’s second piece is a glass sculpture of a fern sprouting, which she titled “Awakenings.”

“Ferns are some of the first (native plants) to awaken — they uncurl, and it’s so very Pacific Northwest. Having been a recent transplant here, I love the Pacific Northwest. So, fertile-heads, it’s the awakening of spring after a long damp winter,” she said.

She also has some ceramic pieces that were class assignments;  one is a ceramic head, another is a piece she calls “The House of Four Directions.”

Starr was a potter for three decades-plus, and did a variety of different work with ceramics. “I’ve been a production potter and a functional potter, I’ve been a architectural ceramist, and I’ve done sculpture, as well. And then I ran out of things to do in clay, so I said ‘Mmm, I think I’ll take a sculpture class,’ ” she said.

Her decision to take Orosco’s sculpture class has paid off, she said.

“After 35 years of looking at things a certain way — I said I played in the mud for 35 years — (now)  I’m doing something completely different,” she  said. “The material lends itself to different ways of thinking, and I think it is the most exciting of the arts.”