ARTS 63 · Basic Ceramic Sculpture

The Art of Fostering Creativity and Patience.

A semester away from screens and syntax, spent learning patience with my hands instead of my head.

July 2026 · Santa Clara, CA · By Hieu Bui

My family has run a ceramics and porcelain tile business in Vietnam for years. I grew up around the language of clay without ever really speaking it — glazes, kilns, firing schedules were things that happened in a factory, not something I made with my own hands. When I saw ARTS 63, Basic Ceramic Sculpture, on the course list, that curiosity is what got me to sign up.

But the real reason I stayed, and the reason I'm writing this at all, has less to do with the family business and more to do with what the class gave back to me personally. Most of my work lives in spreadsheets, models, and code — technical, exacting, and dry in a way that rewards precision but rarely asks anything of your hands or your patience. Ceramics asked for both. Over one semester I built four pieces, and each one taught me something about slowing down that I don't think I could have learned from a textbook or a Jupyter notebook.

01 Rooted and Burning

The Heart

Anatomically inspired clay heart sculpture with root and flame forms

This was my first project, and the one I had the clearest emotional picture of before I ever touched clay. I built an anatomically inspired heart, hollowed out for even drying, with root-like coils wrapping around its base and flame shapes pinched thin and rising from the top vessels. Scored gold vein lines run across the surface and, right at the base, dissolve into the texture of the roots.

The idea was simple to describe and hard to build: a heart that is grounded and on fire at the same time, and where those two things are not in tension but literally the same system. Family and ambition, love and drive, running through the same lines rather than pulling in opposite directions. It's the closest thing I have to a self-portrait in clay.

Building techniques

Hollow-out Pinch Coil Slab Surface scoring Score & slip

The hollowing alone took more patience than I expected. Every wall had to be an even thickness or the whole piece risked cracking in the kiln, and there is no shortcut for that — just checking, thinning, checking again. It was the first time all semester that I understood, physically, why people describe ceramics as a meditative practice.

02 Plot Twist

The Music Box

Torqued ceramic music box with a diagonal rope and spiral opening

This piece was built around "Plot Twist" by Drake, a song about taking back a narrative from people trying to distort it, delivered with cold confidence instead of anger. I wanted the box itself to physically enact that twist: the top is rotated against the base, a clay rope wraps diagonally around the whole form, and the sides are left rough and dark to stand in for the distortion pushing against it. The lid opens into a spiral vortex, the literal plot twist at the center of the piece.

Of the four pieces, this one taught me the most about translation. It's easy to feel a song. It's much harder to figure out which physical decision, a torque here, a rough texture there, actually carries that feeling into an object a stranger could pick up and understand without the music playing.

03 Direction and Reflection

The Compass and the Mirror

Ceramic sculpture merging a compass face and a mirror face on one pedestal

This piece fuses two objects into one continuous form: a compass on one half, its needle raised into a sharp star shape, and a mirror on the other, glazed in a cooler grey to keep its identity distinct. A shared rim and pedestal, finished in a warm bronze tone, keep the two halves reading as one sculpture rather than two objects glued together.

A compass points outward, toward direction in the physical world. A mirror reflects back at the self. Putting them on the same base was my way of arguing that real direction has to start with self-knowledge before it can point anywhere useful, an idea that's stayed with me since a philosophy class the semester before. No text is engraved on the piece to explain any of this except one short phrase on the base. I wanted the concept to survive entirely on craftsmanship, without a caption doing the work for it.

04 Giving From Strength

The Generosity Vessel

Vessel with three rigid sand-toned sides and one overflowing glazed side

My last piece asked a question I'd been sitting with since reading Nietzsche: does true generosity come from inner strength, or from guilt and obligation? I tried to answer it with a vessel that stays sharp-edged and structured on three sides, a self grounded in its own values, while the fourth side softens and pools at the base in a glossy blue-teal glaze that reads like it's overflowing on its own terms rather than being forced out.

If I made it again, I'd add small, individual marks to the rigid sides, something that makes that "self" feel less like pure geometry and more like an actual person standing behind the generosity. That's the kind of note I only know how to give myself after finishing a piece, which might be the whole point of a final critique.

Coding rewards you for being right. Clay only rewards you for paying attention.

Ray with Professor Pancho Jimenez in the ceramics studio

On the person behind the studio

None of these four pieces would have turned out the way they did without Professor Pancho Jimenez. He moved around the studio constantly, sitting down with whoever needed a hand with a tool or a technique that was giving them trouble, and he clearly cared about every student finishing something they were proud of, not just something that survived the kiln.

What I'll remember most is how often he caught the details I'd stopped noticing. I'd think a piece was done, and he'd point out a rough seam or an edge I hadn't smoothed out, the kind of thing that's invisible once you've been staring at your own work for too long. He pushed me to clean and refine each piece further than I would have on my own, and that habit of going back for one more pass is one I've started carrying into my other work, too.

Before the semester ended, he encouraged me to keep going, specifically to look into community ceramic workshops so this isn't a skill that ends with a final critique. I plan to.

I didn't take ARTS 63 expecting it to change how I work, only how I spent one elective slot in a technical degree. But there's a version of patience you only learn by hand, checking a wall thickness with your fingers instead of a test suite, smoothing a seam instead of refactoring a function. I don't think that patience stays in the studio. I've already noticed it showing up when I'm debugging something that won't click, willing to sit with the problem one more pass instead of rushing the fix.

My family has spent decades working with clay as a business. I spent one semester working with it as a student, and came away with something they probably knew all along: that slow, careful, hands-on work has a way of teaching you things that speed never will.

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