RISD Ceramics Course Explores the Sonic Possibilities of Clay

Graduate students in an introductory Ceramics course taught by faculty member Chenlu Hou are taking advantage of the opportunity to explore a medium outside of their majors and discovering how working with clay might inform their design practices. Emphasizing both material exploration and conceptual thinking, the course encourages students to examine the historical, social, and cultural significance of ceramics across different contexts.

“The class is developing a foundational understanding of mold-making, slip-casting, basic clay and glaze chemistry, surface treatments, and various firing processes,” Hou says. The course was inspired by the ceramic sculptures or “paintings in the round” of late artist Toshiko Takaezu, she adds, whose Ocean’s Edge and Tea Bowl are part of the permanent collection of the RISD Museum.

For the first few weeks of the semester, students focused on the basic properties of clay and fundamental techniques for working it such as pinching, coiling, and slab construction. They then moved on to surface considerations—exploring clay’s ability to record touch, pressure, gesture, and process—and various approaches to decoration, like carving, stamping, impressing, and using underglaze.

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One of the course’s unique aspects is its consideration of ceramics as a multisensory medium with sonic possibilities. Hou charged students with creating resonating chambers, sounding objects, or instruments, an exercise that required them to consider how scale, thickness, shape, material, and firing can influence resonance and sound. 

The resulting ceramic sculptures took on a wide variety of forms that can be activated by being struck, rubbed, shaken, blown into, or otherwise handled. Although students were free to explore their own ideas, Hou did impose one constraint on the assignment: each piece could be no more than 16 inches tall, wide, or deep.

Graphic Design student Josh Joseph MFA 27 GD is working on a piece (to be glazed in a bright orange) he jokingly calls Trafficone Megaphone, which will produce sound when shouted into. “Working with clay is more intuitive than graphic design and requires a different way of thinking,” he says. 

Joseph signed up for the course with two friends from his program: Jacob Marcus MFA 27 GD and Annabel Gillespie MFA 27 GD. Marcus is also using humor in his piece, creating vessels to hold different amounts of water and be played like a wineglass xylophone. “I wanted to do something conceptually high-low,” he explains, “so the vessels will look like those red plastic Solo cups rather than wineglasses.”

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Gillespie is putting the finishing touches on a pepper-shaped rattle with small clay balls inside. Although the unfired piece does not seem to be rattling, she works on the surface treatment, layering on two coats of glaze and using sandpaper to reveal traces of the color underneath. “I have a background in printmaking,” she says, “and there’s a lot of conceptual overlap with ceramics. Both mediums utilize traces of the hand that are intentionally left behind, although unlike prints, ceramic pieces are 3D.”

Lisa Wang March 27, Eli Gibson MArch 28, and Kaitlyn Smith MArch 28 come to the class from the Architecture department. Smith says one of the reasons she decided to earn her master’s at RISD is because of this opportunity to work in a range of mediums. “Architecture as a discipline can be so rigid,” she adds. “It’s nice to use my intuition and let the clay speak to me.” She created her sonic piece, which is intended to resemble coral and other undersea life, by cutting abstract shapes out of paper and connecting the corners in different ways. 

Gibson is making a wind chime featuring sea stars and other aquatic characters. “I’m playing with texture as well as color, using an oxidizing glaze for some of the creatures that will be glossy when fired,” he explains. “You can’t test the sound until the piece is finished. It’s like painting with your eyes closed!”

Once the bisque has been glazed and fired, the class will conduct an audio test on each piece before moving on to mold-making and slip-casting with liquid porcelain. “Building objects out of ceramics takes time,” notes Hou. “You have to have patience and an understanding of the material’s limitations and learn how to pivot when things take an unexpected turn.”

Simone Solondz / photos by Kaylee Pugliese
October 16, 2026