MY STORY

Michael Young is a retired Associate Dean for Research at the Jackson School of Geosciences and semi-retired Research Professor in the Bureau of Economic Geology at University of Texas at Austin. His areas of expertise include soil physics, hydrology, and environmental geosciences. His artistic interests remain centered on slab building ceramic pieces and understanding the physico-chemical relations between clay bodies and glazes. Other than ceramics, he plays guitar badly, and sings even worse. He and the late-Kathy McCaston are collaborators on Culture Spin Ceramics (IG: culture.spin.ceramics), a tiny venture where we try to show some of our work, in hopes of brightening someone’s day.

 

Michael began building these crystals in college after taking a crystallography and a ceramics class in the same semester. After a long break, he restarted this artwork and has been building them since. He’s fascinated by the interactions of clay bodies and glazes at high temperature, where the glazes melt, mix, and vitrify, rendering the surface impermeable to liquids, and leaving interesting textures and colors. Ceramics is the perfect mix of geology, soil science, chemistry, physics, thermodynamics, and geometry. It is inspiring and challenging to make perfect polyhedrons and other shapes, to combine the basic building blocks of science into functional shapes and art, and to recognize that—even in Nature—imperfections exist.