Jordan High’s art students display their creativity with art exhibit

From ceramics to paintings, pottery to drawings and photography to calligraphy, a student art display put on at Jordan High School on Jan. 10 was a compilation of art pieces in all different forms.

The assignment for the pottery class was to make a cylinder; that was their only requirement. Students were then free to use their imaginations to create mugs, coin jars, and even creatures with spikes, arms, legs and all different colors. The sky was the limit.

The exhibit is put on in the school’s Tech Atrium twice a year to demonstrate students’ work and encourage others to try their hands at creating pieces similar to the ones displayed.

“We always do this show toward the end of the semester so that the students who are only in semester classes have an opportunity to show their work,” art teacher Cozette Baddley said. “We also use it as a tool to promote our art classes because it’s right before registration.”

Sign-up sheets were available at the entrance where students could choose to sign up for classes for the next semester on the spot, based on the work they were interested in.

We do everything we can to expose the students so they can see what is possible and see what the classes get to do,” Baddley said.

Senior Sam Olesen was nominated for the Deseret News Sterling Scholar program for his painting, which was a concentration piece that depicted the thought process and emotions of an octopus.

“For our AP art class, we had to have a portfolio that included concentration pieces,” Sam said. “Basically you take a main idea and do several pieces of work that concentrate on that idea.”

Other examples of concentration pieces include sea worlds, circus life, dreamscapes and a cracked mirror.

“I’ve always had a big interest in contemporary work,” Sam said. “It’s fantastic to have the opportunity to be Sterling Scholar for this piece and [it] has given me the chance to talk to a lot of people.”