The Sawhill Memorial Gallery stands in memory to the original Sawhill Gallery, which stood just steps away, and to the directors who oversaw its programming.
The wood-lined walls mimic those that lined the old gallery's walls; its accessible location is an homage to Stuart Downs and Gary Freeburg, who played major roles in elevating the visibility of the arts within the School of Art, Design and Art History and throughout the JMU campus. This humble nod affirms SADAH as a place of vital discussion in the visual and all that the visual asks of us.
Casting and Moldmaking
Metals & Ceramics Exchange
Casting is a process in which a liquefied material is poured into a mold to create a volumetric object. These processes are often used to create multiple copies of a design, or to accomplish forms that are impractical to create with other techniques.
Metalsmiths and ceramists both create works of art using variations of the casting process, and this semester, ART 340. Molds and Casting; Metals, and ART 320 Molds and Casting; Ceramics, are scheduled back-to-back to highlight these technical and conceptual overlaps.
Two of the projects in each course are designed as an exchange in which students work independently on a project and then exchange the results with students in the other course. Each receiving student creates a piece to complement the one they received.
Each ceramics student made bowls with slip-cast porcelain and press-molded stoneware and then chose one to exchange with a metals student for a pewter wall hook made using a sand casting technique.
Then metals students then made spoons for the bowls using bronze and the lost-wax casting technique, while students in ceramics made cups for the hooks in porcelain using the slip casting technique.
