by: Ryan McGarty
Senior art students at the University of Montevallo are getting ready to do their senior shows. One of these students is Lara Matalka.
Lara’s specialty is ceramics. She’s been sculpting for almost six years.
““My brother pressured me into taking a ceramics class in high school during my sophomore year and I did it and I got hooked.” Said Matalka.
Matalka’s biggest inspiration in the pieces that she makes is herself and the mental struggles that she has overcome.
“I don’t plan any of my pieces beforehand. I basically work through my emotions with my art. I know that I want to do a face. But how the face is going to look, the emotion that the face has and what comes through the face or around the face that kind of just comes intuitively so I kind of work through my own emotions with my art. So when I sculpt, I’ll look at the finished product, and maybe the finished product looks really sad and that kind of shows me that maybe I’m feeling sad right now.” Matalka explained.
Lara is someone who struggled a lot in her childhood with mental health. She struggled with anxiety and depression. However, she sees sculpting as a way to cope with these issues and says that it has also taught her a lot about life.
““I love the process of sculpting. It’s really something that you have to plan ahead. Like, if it’s a bigger piece you know that you’re going to have to build a wooden armature for it. And then there’s the process of starting a piece which is usually frustrating and tough and I hate it at the beginning. And then I move to the middle of the process and the details of the face are coming out more and I start to enjoy it more. And then the drying process. And then after it dries you have to send it to the kiln. And you don’t know what’s going to happen. It might blow up in the kiln. It’s such a long process and it kind of reminds me of the process of starting and finishing anything in life. It’s scary at first, you might have to plan a lot, you get frustrated, you hate it you don’t think it’s going to work out, just the whole process teaches me to be more patient.”
To learn more about Lara’s work, you can find her on Instagram here
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