The Common Experience committee and Office of Disability Services are pleased to invite you to the first event in this year’s Common Experience programming related to the 2022-2023 theme “All In: Expanding our Disability Advocacy.”

Please join us in UC 127 on Tuesday, October 11th from 7:00-8:30 PM for a panel discussion with members of the IU Southeast community. During this discussion, which will be moderated by Matt Springer, Coordinator of Disability Services, our panelists will describe their experiences as college students who have disabilities, some visible and others invisible. They will also discuss disability advocacy on our campus. There will be time for an audience Q&A as well.

This discussion will include three panelists, who are each either current or former IU Southeast students, who have unique experiences that they are eager to share:

• Carly Riegger (they/them), who refers to themself as a disabled ceramic artist, and would prefer that we use this language to describe them. They are a post-bacc in ceramics, and are currently working on a big project featuring disabled ceramic artists in an exhibition as well as a panel discussion about inclusion of disabled artists, which will take place in March 2023 at the NCECA, the biggest ceramic conference in the U.S.
• Jose Aponte (he/him), who received his BA in Multimedia Journalism in 2017 and his MA in 2022 in Mental Health Counseling. He is a retired military veteran with 24 years of service in both the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Army, with deployments in Kuwait, Iraq, and Afghanistan. He has won awards for his writing and photography. Currently, Jose works as  Vocational Rehabilitation Counselor for the Kentucky Education Cabinet, Division of Blind Services.
• Cheri Receveur (she/her), who is studying Communications at IU Southeast and is also a member of the Honors Program. Cheri is an active member of many organizations on campus, including helping to found the Creativity Club and serving as its first President, working as an SI and Writing Center consultant, and serving in Campus Life as a receptionist and intern to the Dean of Students.

For more information about this year’s theme and the associated reading, Disability Visibility: First Person Stories from the Twenty-First Century, edited by Alice Wong, please visit our website here: https://www.ius.edu/common-experience/currrent-year.html

This week Molly and I wrapped up our exhibition and de-installed! We had the reception and it was nice to celebrate it. It wasn't exactly how we imagined, but it still turned out pretty good and we learned a lot!
I also am starting to build a sculpture. I am imagining this to be a hanging installation. The surface will have one of my 3D printed cell textures and the holes will have fiber. I am excited to get texture on it and see where it goes. I also plan to start another form this week. 

This past week I made a bunch more texture rollers and these are the rolled out results in clay! Two of them are from real images of connective tissue from people with EDS. I am really excited about it and think that adding glaze and underglaze will elevate the texture and my work!

I've been experimenting with the new 3D printed tools I made! I am VERY happy with the cellular texture roller and will be thinking about making similar variations of this design. The extruder die I am happy it worked but I am not so thrilled with it in clay and wondering how I would use it in a piece. 

The exhibition that Molly and I installed is FINALLY up! There were a lot of bumps in the road as we were installing, which was very stressful. I learned a lot from this. We had many expectations for what it would look like going into it, so many of our expectations were not met with the reality and logistics of the space. I am still proud that we stuck with it and put it on the best we could. 

Above are some things I am working on for the 3D printing designs. I am working on a stamp and a texture roller. The roller was just a pattern I worked out with the shapes available in TinkerCad. The stamp is an image of muscle tissue that I took and made into a file that worked in TinkerCad. I already started printing the stamp and hope that it gives me some good feedback for what I want to do for this project. 

This week I have been finishing off installations for the upcoming show. It has been a lot of work. I am very tired. But the installation constructions are going exactly how I had planned in my mind and in my journal, so I am happy about it. I am ready to get this exhibition done with so I can create more work for this semester. 

I have been working on many different projects for an upcoming show by myself and Molly! We are really excited, and also in crunch mode to get it together! I am working out details of hardware to hang fiber without using a ceiling. So this is what I have built so far and I am pretty excited about it. I think it will work and hang the fiber how I am imagining. I also built the structure using the stability of a triangle. It stands about 8 ft tall. Very excited about this and this semester as a whole!

I pulled the petri dish pieces out of the cone 6 glaze kiln and they are bright with color now! I am happy with how they turned out. I'm excited to get resin on them with maybe fiber too! I think these will be a wall piece. I'm hoping to have time to have a print with it. 

I tried mixing a new red glaze this week. It is a copper red. It turned out exactly as I was hoping! So I am really excited about it. I am planning on doing copper as one of my corners in a new triaxial test. I also talked with Lalana about copper reds this week and she directed me to a post from the Ceramic Materials Workshop. So I think I am going to attempt a line blend of this copper glaze but with different amounts of silica, and maybe a different one with different amounts of kaolin. I have a lot more testing to do, but I am really excited about glaze now!
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You can find the recipe here.

This week I worked on some of the petri dishes I got from responses to my survey! I posted on Instagram and asked people with disabilities to anonymously share surgeries and procedures where medical teams had to take away a part of their bodies. I got tons of responses and these are just the small clay pieces I made so far. Pretty much all of them will have both fiber and resin with them. I also imagine these displayed all together on a wall in a big installation.