Dr. Michelle Gevedon

Earth, Fire, and Form: The Geology of Ceramics

Block 4 Fall 2025

Student WorkGY25014 pieces

Students in GY250 spent a block learning to throw on the wheel while studying the geology that governs how clay behaves. Each piece in the exhibit models a geologic process, and the makers' statements explain the science behind their choices.

In Earth, Fire, and Form: The Geology of Ceramics, students studied the geological processes that create and transform ceramic materials while learning to work with those same materials in the pottery studio. I developed the course to bring geology into conversation with creative practice and to make processes such as weathering, metamorphism, melting, crystallization, and redox reactions tangible through materials students could shape, fire, and hold in their hands.

The pieces shown here were created for the course’s final exhibition. Each student selected a geological process or concept to explore through a ceramic work and wrote an artist statement explaining both the science and the creative decisions behind the piece. Students also created the educational text displayed with the exhibition, translating geological ideas for a public audience.

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The course followed ceramic materials from their geological origins through their transformation in the kiln. Students studied how silicate minerals weather to form clays, how clay structure influences material properties, and how temperature and chemical conditions control metamorphism, vitrification, oxidation and reduction, and crystal growth. Studio work with Jeremiah Houck in the Bemis School of Art allowed students to observe many of these processes directly as they learned to wedge, throw, trim, glaze, and fire.

GY250 was developed to fulfill Colorado College’s Creative Process general education requirement. Students engaged in repeated cycles of making, experimentation, evaluation, revision, and reflection while applying scientific concepts to creative work. The course connected geology with the broader liberal arts by asking students to move between scientific explanation, material experimentation, aesthetic decisions, and communication.

The Earth, Fire, and Form: The Geology of Ceramics exhibit on display
The GY250 exhibit in the first-floor atrium of the Tutt Science Center. Each piece is numbered to match its page here.
The GY250 exhibit in the first-floor atrium of the Tutt Science Center. Each piece is numbered to match its page here.

The Pieces