Calming Creations: Senior’s backup elective turned into her main passion and hobby

When filling out her schedule for freshman year, Ava Deschaine scribbled down three electives for her backups: jewelry, painting and ceramics. Certain she’d get into advanced foods, Deschaine was anything but thrilled when she found out she had to spend a whole semester with clay crusting up under her fingernails. Deschaine hesitantly stepped into room 207 on her first day of school, hoping to get through the class without ruining her first project. 

Now a senior, Deschaine has gone from quietly sitting in the back of the classroom to helping other students perfect their hand-building skills and center their clay. She excitedly filled out her new favorite class all four years and she’s now creating a studio in her basement.

“I don’t really like playing sports or anything,” Deschaine said. “This is, I would say, my main hobby. It’s something I do for myself because I really enjoy it.”

For Deschaine, throwing clay on the wheel during class has become a major stress reliever, where her focus goes solely onto her piece, providing an escape from her CAT worksheet or Spanish 6 study guide. The ability to clear her mind, and the excitement she gets from seeing her finished product on her dresser at home, has made ceramics something that she can look forward to during her hectic school day. 

“It’s a really, really good break in my day,” Deschaine said. “If I have stuff going on at school, if I’ve had a crappy day or a big test, that class always makes me feel a lot better.” 

Deschaine has taken five semesters of ceramics since her first time stepping in the room freshman year, which makes her one of only two students currently taking the class for a fourth year. Grouped with beginner students, Deschaine is allowed creative freedom on her projects from her teacher Jennifer Hensley, making everything from pumpkin decorations for her mom to a set of hand-built ceramic pomegranates for Christmas gifts — while the rest of the class is still working on their second beginner project of making trays. 

Her passion for ceramics has grown so much that for her past birthday, Deschaine’s parents surprised her with her own wheel to make ceramics at home. After looking for two months, Deschaine and her parents bought a Speedball Clayboss, the most affordable wheel with all the features Deschaine was looking for, which will arrive around Christmas time. 

The wheel inspired Deschaine’s family to turn one of the rooms in the basement into a ceramics studio. They plan to put in an air filter, tables, shelves and tools to make a work area. According to her dad Ryan Deschaine, she’s been spending hours creating pieces in the garage, so he wanted to give her a more comfortable space with the cold weather. 

“She just enjoys it so much,” Ryan said. “She’s passionate about it. We decided to embrace it as a hobby of hers. [The wheel and studio] will open up the opportunity for her to be able to throw pottery more.”

Working on ceramics three to four times a week and building on her skills in and out of the classroom, Deschaine checks over her teacher’s assignments to make sure she didn’t forget any important questions, helps first-year students learn to sculpt and takes projects out of the kiln to help her teacher.

Junior Aina Lewis, who has been in class with Deschaine for two years, feels that Deschaine has become a role model to her and other students. Lewis struggles with hand-building sculptures, so watching the focus that Deschaine has when hand-building gives Lewis a new perspective.

“I definitely look up to her,” Lewis said. “It makes me more willing to go out of my comfort zone and hand-build more. It makes me want to try and do things that I wasn’t necessarily comfortable with but I needed to do to grow as a person. ”

Deschaine feels she’s grown to become more well-rounded in creating ceramics. Going in during seminar and after school, she’s observed her pieces become more symmetrical, thinner and larger — an improvement since the ceramic tile embedded with a palm tree pattern that she made as her first project freshman year. 

“My stuff is a lot more realistic,” Deschaine said. “[My first project] looks like a kindergartener drew it. I’ve kind of gotten better at using glazes to increase definition and I’ve mastered how to use certain tools.”

Part of what makes Deschaine return to ceramics year after year is the friendships she’s formed with the other advanced students. Whether it’s arguing about if water is wet or ranking different “Gossip Girl” episodes, Deschaine and her tablemates are able to joke around while bonding over their art. Following their first semester final last year, Deschaine and some of her classmates went outside and had a snowball fight. 

“All the advanced kids were able to talk and get to know each other while we made things that we all loved,” Lewis said. “It was really cool to not only share something that we all love but to be able to talk to each other on a more personal level.”

Deschaine hopes to use the studio when she comes home from college to continue making ceramics, working on throwing larger pieces and moving slower so that the pieces don’t get lopsided. Her goal in the future is to make a piece that’s over two-feet tall. 

“It’s just relaxing,” Deschaine said. “And it’s really fun. It’s something I looked forward to when we were online. I was emailing my teacher because I was really excited to go back and throw.”