The Project That Will Never Be

It was mid-march when the entire educational world was turned upside down, and PSU was not excluded. As the danger of Covid19 became more real, my classes and plans, like all of my fellow peers were ground to a halt.

We did not know that our Wednesday class together before the beginning of spring break, would be our last for the semester, for some of us, our last class together period. That seems like it was a lifetime ago, even though realistically it was only a little over a month.

Though our educational lives, have been turned upside down for the sake of safety, life still goes on. I now see my peers from the other side of a computer screen, and I’ve gone from hunching over a wheel to hunching over my laptop. Days come and go, the world outside gets crazier and crazier, the news louder and louder, and we’re all inside finding new ways to communicate with each other and create.

I think, it’s important to point out now, that I am not a lazy student. I’ve never avoided doing an assignment simply because I didn’t feel like it, or because it looked hard. That all said, when my teacher assigned us project 4, I’ve never wanted to ignore an assignment more.

The project originally had us creating a combination of wheel-thrown and extruded forms. The goal basically being to learn to use the extruder successfully. A large part of the assignment was researching, planning, sketching, and creating maquettes. The second half of the assignment was creating the forms themselves and then later in the year painting them. But since the switch to online, we would not be able to do the second half of the project.

Forcing myself to work on this assignment was rough. Every time I attempted to tackle it, a sense of overwhelming sadness and frustration would overtake me. Something that I used to enjoy doing, was now heartbreaking. When I tried to research ideas, when I tried to sketch out designs, when I tried to plan out my maquettes. It was frustratingly painful and pointless feeling planning a project I’d never create, and a constant reminder I’d never be back in my wheel throwing class with my friends.

It also felt silly. To be so angry and upset over having to do a simple assignment. But the more I look back at trying to work on it, the more I think it wasn’t really even about the assignment. In this time of uncertainty when so many more important fears cloud my mind, on the surface, it did seem silly for these to be the things I was upset about. But maybe I was upset about it because it was the only thing I allowed myself to think and be upset about.

In a lot of ways, creating art, and being in the studio with my peers and friends, was my happy place. No matter the stress of my life and the outside world, I could block it all out and throw myself into my art. I’d often let the assignments overtake me, and would keep myself so busy I didn’t have time to stop and think about the other stressful parts of my life. I had a safe place to focus on the tree so I could ignore the overwhelming forest. I never really had to be alone with myself.

But now my life has been ground to a stop, and my normal ways of functioning and coping have all been ripped out from under me like a rug. So not only are there all these new worries and fears joining my normal fears. Like knowing my mom is still going to work (as well as everyone else in my family) even though she’s at high risk if she were to catch COVID19. And I still have to keep working, along with having all my classes online. But I have no real way to deal with any of it besides pretending that the fears not there. Because if I begin to allow myself to be upset, then it will eat me alive.

Project 4 is a crack in the lie. It’s the tree that when I look at it reminds me of the overwhelming forest around me. I can’t afford to acknowledge it right now. So I will share where I took inspirations from, and I will share my sketches, but I cannot pursue project 4 any further.