A strong breeze carried the tinkling chimes of the swinging clay tablets across the Oxnard College campus as a crowd gathered beneath the branches of the bedecked trees.
April 29 was the closing of Oxnard’s ‘How Are You?’ ceramics project. Participants and artists from the project came together to remove the artwork, and to put it in a special place.
The ‘How Are You?’ project was the brainchild of Jenchi Wu and her OC ceramics class. The idea was to hang clay tablets, made by the class, in the trees around OC campus, and to let people passing by write how they were feeling. These passers-by could not just write the simple answer of “good” or “bad,” they really had to write what was on their minds.
“I asked [my students], how can we really bring the campus together using art?” said Wu.
The project turned out to be a great success, leaving the clean up team plenty of tablets to remove from the trees. According to Wu, most students and faculty were surprised by the idea of others wanting to know what they were thinking.
“One person asked me ‘Do you really want to know how I feel?'” Wu said. “I said, ‘Yeah!'”
After being removed, each of the tablets was placed in one of two clay jars made by the ceramics class. The jars would later be sealed and presented to Oxnard College as a time capsule, a voice from Oxnard College, Spring 2010.
Liberal Arts Dean Robert Taylor cut the first tablet from the tree at the removal ceremony.
“Feel pretty good,” the tablet read. “It’s a pretty day (sunny) & it makes me feel great.”
As soon as Taylor had placed his tablet in the jar, the trees were swarmed with students bearing scissors. Others sat by the jars and helped untangle the twine knots that had previously hung the tablets from the branches. Melissa Knuppel, a 28-year-old natural science major was among them.
“I don’t think a lot of people feel like they have a voice on Oxnard campus,” Knuppel said. “This project gave them a chance to say what they think about themselves or the school.”
Wu was sometimes surprised by how honest students were about their feelings.
“I read one that said ‘In a financial crisis, possibly going to lose my house, but I’m doing good in school, so it’s going to be worth it,'” Wu said. “It made me want to cry.”
Students laughed and talked to each other as they searched the branches of the trees for any well-placed tablets that had been missed. Mitchell Wu, Jenchi’s husband, captured the fun moments on camera as he walked around.
“It’s really amazing because we can get the whole school involved, not just the art department,” Mitchell Wu said. “And on a day like today, when the wind is blowing, it becomes sound art, not just visual. You can hear it.”
Students and faculty alike were sad to see the successful art project removed, but Jenchi Wu hopes that another department might take on a similar unification challenge.
“Our project is designed to breakdown, if even in a small way, that barrier to communication and authentic community,” Wu said. “Our project encourages the student body to rethink the question ‘How are you?’ so that they resist using it as a social shield and begin using it as a means to open genuine conversation.”
