Behind the Abandoned Works

All right everyone! J-Peg and H2O in the house AKA Josh Schutz and Hanna Newman. We are two graduate students wrapping up our final semester of the ceramics MA program at MNSU. When presented with the opportunity to scrounge Nelson Hall for abandoned works, we immediately rose to the challenge. The ceramic and sculpture studios have served as our second home for both our undergraduate and graduate degrees, so with years of familiarity we were uniquely qualified to tackle the task at hand.

Some people may not have thought to check the ceiling rafters, behind kilns, or on top of partitions separating individual studio spaces, but this is where we found a majority of the left behind work.

Figure 1 Abandoned work in Rafters

Some works had gathered great amounts of dust and needed cleaning, and as ceramicists we could relate. So we carefully cleaned ourselves and then the work before taking photographs of the work to share with the class and for use in promotional materials. There is a constant state of flux in Nelson Hall as from one semester to the next works are left behind, repurposed, altered, or left in discrete locations. The permanence of the material is reflected in student’s hesitance to properly dispose of or find a location to store said objects.

Figure 2 A Kiln God gathers dusts for at least a decade.

This exhibition has offered a great opportunity for us to utilize these works that were left behind, as we are collectively interested in questions surrounding the value of art and these objects in particular. We found it interesting that we later discovered works within the Nelson Hall collection within a storage closet that were in a similar condition, slowly collecting dust. We feel that these abandoned works exhibited alongside works displayed and valued from the university will create an interesting conversation around the value placed on art by both the artist and the viewer. The process of collecting these abandoned works has stirred within us questions of what we, as art graduate students, feel is worth being considered as art.