UAF ceramics studio welcomes acclaimed artist Dawn Holder

Story and photos by Lizzy Hahn

Dawn Holder, a professor and artist, works on a sculptural piece of art based off of a vertebrae that a viewer brought in.

With birch bark, flowers, mushrooms and even a burbot head in hand, students and the public gathered at the University of Alaska Fairbanks ceramics studio to watch and learn from an acclaimed professional. Visiting artist Dawn Holder gave ceramics demonstrations for two days, teaching students how to take these fragile objects and preserve their memory in clay. Holder is currently an associate professor at the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis, Indiana; her art is exhibited across the world.

“It was nice to have an open conversation while I was working on some of the sculptural forms,” Holder said.

Students and community members gathered early Tuesday morning, October 21, to hear from Holder and watch her at work. Holder is a sculptor, meaning she does not use the potter’s wheel. Instead, she hand sculpts many of her pieces. For her grass lawn exhibits, Holder used plaster molds to create each individual blade of grass. 

That evening, Holder used a collage of found poems to describe her work during her presentation in the BP Theater.

“Mow correctly, and you'll groom turf that's healthy, drought-tolerant, and thick enough to crowd out weeds,” Holder said, while a picture of a porcelain lawn she had made was projected behind her. “Mow incorrectly, and your lawn will struggle to survive.”

The lawns that she builds out of pottery are meant to be commentary on all of the symbols that lawns have in America. She cited many statistics like a 2005 NASA survey that found that turf grass “took up nearly 2 percent of the entire surface of the continental U.S.”

UAF graduate student Amy Edler holds the skeleton of a dead bird that she dipped into the slip on Wednesday, October 22, 2025. Edler said she found this bird dead after it had hit a window.

During her second day of demonstrations at the UAF ceramics studio, Holder wanted to provide students with a hands-on learning opportunity. Showing up with boxes of natural materials gathered from the forest, like mushrooms, birch bark, even a dead bird was in attendance.

“I invited the students to bring in any kind of objects they wanted to dip in slip,” Holder said. “The process kind of creates a ceramic shell around the form and you're almost making fragile fossils of the pieces.”

Slip dipping involves dipping an organic material into a clay slurry, called slip. The slip creates a layer around the object. Once in the kiln, this organic material burns away, leaving just the slip cast remaining. This is a very delicate process as the layer of slip around each object is very thin compared to a typical mug someone would make out of clay. Holder uses this technique of slip dipping in her own projects at her home studio. 

This trip marked Holder’s first-time visiting Alaska. Upon arriving in Fairbanks, UAF ceramics students took Holder on a tour of the UAF trails.

Dawn Holder talks to a student as objects that were dipped in slip dry on a hanger behind her.

“That was nice to have a moment experiencing some of the natural landscape here,” Holder said.

Holder first started testing out the slip dipping technique with one of her graduate students around seven or eight years ago, according to her.

“We just mixed up some slip and started experimenting,” Holder said. After lots of trial and error, Holder found that natural or organic materials had the most success during the entire slip dipping process.

At the end of the second day, Holder expressed a great amount of gratitude and thanked the generosity from the students and faculty she met.

“Going outside of your community and seeing what the visual culture and style that people are working in other places can be really inspirational,” Holder said.

First image: Students brought in various mushrooms to be used as models for ceramics visiting artist Dawn Holder to use on the first day of her demonstrations in the UAF ceramics studio on Tuesday, October 21, 2025.

Last image: Dawn Holder works on making a clay version of a wasp comb nest that UAF ceramics graduate student Amy Edler brought in.