Story by Bridgette McAuliffe, Staff Writer
Photo courtesy of Anna Sohl
Anna Sohl, a senior from Paducah, Kentucky, is hosting her BFA art exhibition April 27 until May 4 in the Clara M. Eagle Upper Gallery in Price Doyle Fine Arts Center.
“I pinpoint the start of my art career when I started taking one of my first ceramics classes,” Sohl said. “But it goes even further back than that. I can date it back to elementary school.”
Sohl said she was drawn to art because she enjoyed working with her hands.
“I fell in love with clay first,” Sohl said. “I loved the feeling of the material and I love that you can do a lot of things with it. Knowing that this material can be sculptural, it can be functional, it can be hanging up on the wall, the wide possibility of the medium, I like 3D media a lot better [than 2D].”
When Sohl was a child, art allowed her to see things in a different way.
“From what we call a mistake, you can always transform that into something beautiful,” Sohl said. “Anything you do, there’s always another solution. It may not be exactly where you want to go, but you can always manipulate it into something that’s still pleasing.”
Sohl said that is one thing she keeps within her thought process when she’s struggling with her art. She said that she knows if she makes a mistake, there’s always a different tunnel.
Though Sohl specializes in clay and wood, she doesn’t like to classify herself simply as a potter or a woodworker.
“I like to call myself a maker,” Sohl said. “Art is not just the object, it’s a higher thinking of visually producing information and engaging with the viewer. I’m making these pieces for people to engage with or interact with or just view in a way that it draws the person in.”
Sohl’s exhibit on the seventh floor of Price Doyle Fine Arts Center is entitled, “Dialogue.” She said she is hoping her piece opens a conversation between viewers and allow them to explore difficult topics of conversation.
Sohl took a step back from clay to focus on woodworking for the exhibit which will consist of chairs with different designs.
“The chairs represent an individual,” Sohl said. “I use the material as the dialogue and the chair as the individual [to show] how these individuals interact with one another.”
Sohl said she this body of work is representative of the conversations people have with one another and the misinterpretation of words caused by nonverbal cues.
“The pieces in my show may not pinpoint directly to those conversations, but I’m hoping that by creating this conversation between the chairs, it can create another dialogue and evoke another conversation in [the viewers],” Sohl said.