Skullduggery

“Skullduggery,” a collection of wheel thrown pottery and ceramic porcelain wall hangings by Ian Childers of the Mississippi University for Women art faculty, is currently on display in the W.O. Benjamin Fine Arts Center Gallery at the Itawamba Community College Fulton Campus.

Childers spent his youth in Philadelphia, Pa. mired in punk rock, hip hop and the rave culture of the 1990s. He apprenticed as a tattoo artist immediately out of high school and spent his evenings writing graffiti, riding BMX bikes, going to shows and causing general mayhem.

In the late 1990s, Childers left the northeast in search of a new perspective. He found himself as an art student at a small liberal arts college in north Georgia, where he was introduced to ceramics as a requirement for graduation. After his first class, he was completely hooked. “Life in Georgia was uncomfortably slow for me; sitting at a potter’s wheel was the first thing I found in the south that helped calm my angst and direct my energy towards something creative,” Childers said. Shortly after deciding to become a ceramics major, he found crystalline glazes, which challenged him and created a lifelong passion.

In 2005, Childers was accepted to the University of Massachusetts in Amherst as a graduate student in ceramics. He spent the next three years focused on research and development of his crystalline glazes. Since that time, he has shown his work and conducted workshops extensively both internationally and nationally. In 2013 he was invited to attend a symposium in La Bisbal, Spain to show his work and lecture about his techniques in crystalline glazing to the international community. Most recently, his work and technique have been featured in the July/August 2016 issue of Pottery Making Illustrated.

Childers is a professor of ceramics at MUW.

The exhibit will run through Dec. 2. Gallery hours are 8 a.m.-4 p.m., weekdays. There is no admission.

For more information, contact Shawn Whittington at (662) 862-8301 or email eswhittington@iccms.edu.