Alex makes her space in the studio

Anyone who has been here - or seen the photos in the blog - knows that this is a one-man studio. There's too much junk haphazardly placed around this former two-car garage to accommodate another human and his or her work. Nevertheless ...

Two weeks ago, Alex Urbina started her spring internship with me here in the studio. She's a junior at Falmouth High School (Hannah McAndrew and Doug Fitch worked in her school studio last spring) and enjoys sculpture and other handwork. But she wants to learn to throw. So for the past couple of weeks, she's alternated between work on the wheel and building a dragon. In the photo above, she's at work on a prototype dragon (you can see the teeth in its head) which she hopes will help her design a big one by the end of her time here.

The internship, one of many at potters' studios around Cape Cod, is coordinated and funded through the Cape Cod Museum of Art. It's a program that the museum takes very seriously and both the student and the potter have paperwork to fill out at the end of the student's time in the studio. Also at the end of the internship, the museum hosts an exhibit in one of its galleries of work by the students and by the mentors. That's why Alex wants to make the big dragon, which is destined for the spring museum show.

Alex is a serious and occasionally sardonic student, she learns well and has produced two bowls and a cup on the wheel and the beginnings of the small dragon. Last Thursday she also was the main siever of mixed glazes and cleaner of buckets and sieve as I finished up glazing for the most recent firing. She's also begun prodding me about the high school's version of the Empty Bowls project, which is coming up. And she's hoping to sell us tickets to the spring production of "Footloose," where she is, I think, the props manager. Smart kid.