Quietude

Author

• Caroline Roberts, Utah State UniversityFollow

Date of Award

5-2026

Degree Type

Creative Project

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts (MFA)

Department

Art and Design

Committee Chair(s)

Dan Murphy

Committee

Dan Murphy

Committee

Todd Hayes

Committee

Ryoichi Suzuki

Abstract

I grew up in a landscape shaped by the slow withdrawal of an ancient glacier. Its passage carved, gathered, deposited, and smoothed, a force both powerful and tender. What remains is not dramatic ruin, but a terrain of gradual accumulation. Small shifts in light, air, and temperature create an immersive atmosphere—an intimacy that comes through proximity, through a landscape encountered within reach.

This body of ceramic work emerges from an attempt to create such an atmosphere. I am interested in how an object might carry a similar quietude—not as absence or restraint, but as an active force. It is the charged pause before wind moves through trees, the weight of humidity before rain. It is a presence that gathers slowly and reveals itself over time.

Clay is a material of compression and release. It records pressure. It remembers touch. In shaping and firing, I think about accumulation—how a surface can hold the trace of movement, how an edge can imply erosion, how a subtle shift in tone can echo the migration of light across land. Forms emerge through gestures that are repeated, layered, and revised. Glazes pool and recede like shallow water, collecting in low places, thinning along raised contours.

From afar, a form may appear still and self-contained; up close, it reveals variation: minute fissures, gradations of color, the evidence of gravity. Light becomes a collaborator, sliding across a surface and altering its temperature. The object changes as the viewer shifts position, just as a field alters beneath a passing cloud.

I return often to the idea of withdrawal. Not as a loss, but as a generative act. When the glacier receded, it left behind the conditions for growth: wetlands, grasses, a complex ecology sustained by what had been displaced. In my studio, subtraction serves a similar function. What is removed allows what remains to breathe.Space around a form becomes as vital as the form itself.

Quietude is not silence or emptiness—a backdrop against which we might find a sense of calm— but an inner condition. It is present in the landscape that formed me and my hope is that it is present in this exhibition, where these works become another ground in which quietude operates, gathering through material, gesture, and form. Quietude can also be present within ourselves, not as something given, but as something practiced: a way of being that is patient, receptive, and attuned.

Recommended Citation

Roberts, Caroline, "Quietude" (2026). All Graduate Reports and Creative Projects, Fall 2023 to Present. 149.
https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/gradreports2023/149