Student art project brings a prehistoric touch to Miller Hall landscaping
Have you noticed the woolly mammoth emerging from a small wetland area behind Miller Hall? The prehistoric beast is the work of four students in Art Professor Patrick McCormick’s fall quarter ceramics class.
“It was our creature-feature project, is what Pat called it,” says Studio Art sophomore Tyler Will of Spokane. “My idea was to make it look like the mammoth was coming out of the swamp, or sinking in, whatever way you want to look at it.”
The group recently installed the pieces of the ceramic sculpture themselves in the wetland area. “We basically just took off our shoes and waded in,” he says.
Response so far has been positive, Will says. “I saw one of the police officers step out of his car and take a picture of it,” he says. “I was afraid he might have been taking a picture for police purposes. I asked him and he said, no, he thinks it’s cool.”
McCormick got the idea for the assignment from the wetland itself, which he says looked a bit like a bog in need of a monster. He hopes to put the students’ other swamp-monster projects, including a blue space alien that for a short time resided in the swamp with the mammoth, in “our little garden,” the small wooded area next to the pottery studio.
Jim Schuster, the director of Viking Union Facilities who manages the approval process for using exterior spaces on campus, says the sculpture will probably remain until spring, when landscaping repairs are scheduled in that area.
