Michael Young

I am a ceramicist inspired by the beauty and simplicity of crystals, sometimes called geometric shapes or polyhedrons. These can be functional vessels or standalone art work. They are often glazed in earth tones that mimic the natural beauty of our home—Earth. The shapes often take the form of Platonic Solids, which were identified by the great philosophers Theaetetus, Pythagoras, Euclid, and Plato. They noted these 3-D geometric shapes (polyhedrons) have unique properties with identical faces of regular polygons, where the same number of faces meet at each vertex, and where edges meet at the same internal angle. Only five of these shapes exist in Nature. Four were assigned the elements of Life (fire, land, air, and water), and the fifth Solid, the dodecahedron, represents the Universe.

I began building these crystals in college after taking a crystallography and a ceramics class in the same semester. After a long break, I restarted this artwork and have been building them since. I’m 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 Platonic Solids and other shapes, to combine the basic building blocks of science into functional shapes, and to recognize that—even in Nature—imperfections exist.