The Department of Art and Design welcomed ceramic artist Christina Cordova to UW-Whitewater as the 2025 Annette and Dale Schuh visiting artist. On Thursday, March 14, the Embodied Connections reception took place in the Greenhill Center of the Arts at Crossman Gallery. Cordova came in to talk about her collaboration with the students for Embodied Connections: Figurative Ceramics and Cultural Narratives. This reception was free for all students to attend, and they got to know more about Cordova and what inspired her art for this collaboration.
“I brought two of those to share, the idea behind those two pieces has to do with different things,” Cordova said. “One has to do with the anterior quality of the body, what stays and what leaves. Edge between physicality and spirituality and the other one is a little bit more surreal and has a big wave like a swimmer, the drawing is a portrait of my brother. All the work in the middle is created by the students who participated in the class.”
The Embodied Connections collaboration has been an ongoing project through the 2025 Schuh Visiting Artist program since late January. Students have been working with Cordova to explore the intersection of figurative ceramics and cultural narratives. They met via Zoom for three hours to share different techniques and aspects of ceramics.
“It’s been a journey, that’s for sure,” senior graphic design major Karina Petro said. “She gave us a prompt during the first class; she told us to bring up things that were personal to us. We all individually worked on our projects around each other to help each other. Clay is something that takes a lot of time, especially with bigger sculptures. Something personal to me was music. I would play all my music on a big stereo and I thought I would make that replica in clay.”
“She gave us some guidance, she showed us some demoing and guided us through,” Janet Nelson said. “I thought of something that I identified with, a Scandinavian, Norwegian background. I did this cow with a cardinal on the tip, I put a lot into it and I grew up on a dairy farm.”
“We discussed what identity means, there’s just so many different forms of identity,” Hannah Memel said. “The moment where you don’t have anything planned, you don’t know what to do, and you have to pick a route to go. I wanted to capture that. This can be both the moment where you just don’t have an identity and also the moment where a false identity falls apart.”
The anchor exhibition was crafted by the whole group and will serve as an expression of emotional frequencies, grounded in clay. The other pieces around are projects that the students made that reflect an identity, place, and individual voices. The aim of the course was to guide students in creating ceramic pieces that are meaningful and authentic, all while reflecting on the shared personal and collective narratives that shape identity.
