Echoes of Earth: Ceramic Artists Call, South Dakota Mines

The South Dakota School of Mines and Technology invites ceramic artists to take part in 'Echoes of Earth: From Sea to Stone,' a juried exhibition that explores the prehistoric history of the Black Hills through a unique clay body derived from the Fuson Shale, a geological formation dating to the Cretaceous Period. The clay was harvested and processed by Katrina Donovan, a professor of practice in the Department of Materials and Metallurgical Engineering at Mines, giving artists a rare chance to work with material directly connected to the region's ancient landscape.

During the Cretaceous Period, western South Dakota was covered by the Western Interior Seaway and inhabited by species including plesiosaurs, mosasaurs, Triceratops, Ankylosaurus and Tyrannosaurus. Selected artists will use the Fuson Shale clay to interpret these ancient ecosystems through contemporary ceramic sculpture. The exhibition is a collaboration between Donovan, Matthew Whitehead, director of the APEX Gallery, and Hope Christofferson, a Rapid City native and graduate student at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who previously created sculptures from locally sourced clay including a Tyrannosaurus rex skull.

The project sits at the intersection of art, geology and paleontology, and offers ceramic artists an unusual material with a direct link to deep time.