久久热视频 of Liberal Arts
A Landscape of Attention: Dawn Holder鈥檚 Artful Visit to UAF
Sarah Manriquez, CLA Public Information OfficeDecember 8, 2025cla-pio@alaska.edu
Arriving With Curiosity, Not Conclusions
When ceramic artist Dawn Holder stepped onto the 久久热视频 campus, she did so the way she enters nearly every new place: slowly, observantly, and with the kind of openness that makes noticing feel like a practice. She had never been to Alaska before. She wanted to know how the ground felt underfoot, what kinds of trees clustered together, how the air moved across campus. Before her scheduled events even began, she went for a walk with students鈥攁n informal ritual of grounding, as much for them as for herself.
Holder, who teaches at Indiana University Indianapolis鈥 Herron School of Art and directs its MFA program, calls herself 鈥渁n art nomad.鈥 She has lived and worked in cities, mountains, and small towns; in lofts, cabins, and studios tucked into unfamiliar landscapes. That movement鈥攏ot just across geography but across ways of living鈥攊nflects her practice with a deep attentiveness to what our environments say about us, and what we, in turn, inscribe onto them.
Her two-day visit, hosted by the UAF Student Ceramics Art Guild and Department of Art, unfolded as an invitation into that attentiveness.
A Talk That Wasn鈥檛 a Talk
Holder warned the audience before she began: what they were about to witness was not a typical artist lecture. Instead, she presented a collage of found language鈥攆orestry manuals, suburban histories, botanical descriptions, climate reports, lawn-care instructions, poetry. As the words accumulated, they mirrored the layering in her own sculptural installations: disparate fragments that only become articulate when experienced together.
The piece revealed less about the chronology of her career than the circuitry of her thinking. It offered a glimpse into the constellations of influence鈥攅cological grief, domestic space, gendered labor, the Anthropocene, decay, play, and suburban aesthetics鈥攖hat form the backdrop to her studio practice.
When the lights came up, the audience had not been told what to think about her work. Instead, they had traveled through the ecosystem of ideas that nourish it.
Seeing the Everyday as a Site of Meaning
The everyday has always been Holder鈥檚 most provocative collaborator. Growing up in Atlanta, she absorbed suburban landscapes鈥攍awns, cul-de-sacs, gridded neighborhoods鈥攚ithout question. Only later, living in cities shaped by entirely different logics, did she begin to understand how deeply cultural identity is embedded in place.
Her porcelain installations of lawns, neighborhood grids, and fragments of domestic space reveal the strange tension of American landscapes: spaces meant to invite belonging that often depend on exclusion; 鈥渟hared鈥 suburban terrains shaped by unspoken social rules; beauty that conceals environmental costs.
She is deeply interested in the messages our environments send鈥攅specially the ones we didn鈥檛 realize we authored. 鈥淲e can do anything we want,鈥 she said at one point, 鈥渟o why do we choose the things that we choose?鈥
For Holder, art is a process of laying those choices bare, not with accusation but with curiosity.
The Poetry of Making, the Precision of Process
Holder鈥檚 installations often appear delicate, even effortless鈥攆ields of porcelain grass bending in imagined breezes, floral grids that echo botanical plates, miniature sidewalk bricks inset with tiny worlds. But the work is intensely physical and technical.
During her visit, students crowded into the ceramics studio to learn how she forms her pieces, whether casting tiny blades of porcelain or building a landscape tile by tile. She talked about her years of experimentation, the months spent failing forward, the iterations that looked like 鈥渃arpet, or celery, or whatever鈥 before they finally became grass.
This honesty resonated deeply with students. Many recognized in her process a model for their own: patience, experimentation, and the permission to learn through what doesn鈥檛 work.
The Slip-Dip Workshop: Ephemeral Things, Lasting Impressions
On the second day, Holder led a hands-on workshop using porcelain slip鈥攁n open invitation for students from across the arts to bring objects from the natural world and temporarily lend them a second life. Leaves, grasses, dried flowers, bits of organic matter: all dipped, coated, transformed.
Most of the objects would burn out in the kiln, leaving behind fragile ceramic shells. Many would break. Some would survive. All of them, Holder assured the group, would be beautiful in their own imperfect way.
What could have felt like a materials demonstration instead became something more reflective: an exercise in letting go, attending closely, and noticing what remains.
Teaching Without Telling
Throughout her visit, Holder returned to the idea that landscapes鈥攂uilt or natural鈥攃arry stories about who we are. But she never reduced those stories to lessons. Instead, she offered frameworks for inquiry: how urban design reflects cultural values; how lawn maintenance encodes gender roles; how fossil beds and botanical specimens collapse time into something we can touch; how the human body itself is a collective, not a singularity.
Her generosity was not in answers, but in approach. She models a practice grounded in research, yes, but also in wonder. She asks students to look at familiar environments as if they were encountering them for the first time. To pay attention. To ask better questions.
What UAF Offered鈥攁nd What She Gave Back
UAF鈥檚 creative community thrives on exchange鈥攁rtists learning from artists, students discovering new ways to see their home terrain through someone else鈥檚 lens. Holder鈥檚 visit embodied that spirit. Faculty, staff, and students created the conditions for her to explore, to share, and to engage deeply. And in return, she offered them the rare gift of perspective: a reminder that art is not only something we make, but a way we move through the world.
As students filed out of the studio, carrying damp slip on their hands and new ideas in their minds, it was clear that Holder鈥檚 impact would not be limited to the pieces fired in the kiln. It lingered in the way they looked at the campus plants, the studio materials, and even the quiet spaces between buildings鈥攑laces she encouraged them to see not just as scenery, but as collaborators.
A Legacy of Noticing
Holder鈥檚 work spans landscapes large and small, from suburban grids to fossilized seas. But the through-line is a simple, radical act: noticing the world with care.
Her visit to UAF reminded our community that art can illuminate the everyday, reveal our entanglements with the environment, and shift how we imagine our place in a much longer story.
In the end, her impact here may be measured less in porcelain or glaze than in attention鈥攊n the way students now pause to observe the moss, the lichen, the trace of a leaf on snow. In the way they might reconsider the landscapes they inherit and the ones they will shape.
Holder鈥檚 artistry begins with that pause. During her short time at UAF, she taught us how to hold it a little longer.
Your gift to the Department of Art helps bring inspiring visiting artists to campus, expand student opportunities, and strengthen arts education across disciplines. Consider making a donation to ensure these transformative experiences continue.
