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Emily Dyjak's Polar Bear

Updated: Mar 7, 2022

I made a polar bear inspired animal pot. The main majority of polar bears live north of the Arctic Circle to the North Pole. Other locations of polar bears are Alaska, Canada, Russia, Greenland, and in habitats with extremely cold consistent weather. Polar bears are labeled endangered as their status in the United States and on the “IUCN Red List of Threatened Species” are labeled as “vulnerable”.


Their status has been this since the year 1982. This is due to their cold, ice, and frozen sea habitat having negative effects from climate change. To go into detail, polar bears spend most of their time hunting for food. Their main food source is bearded seals. Due to climate change there is continuous loss and melting of ice in their habitat. Thus negatively affecting and decreasing their food supply and habitable land available for them to live. What led me to choose the polar bear to make for this project of all the endangered or vulnerable animals is that they are truly adorable creatures with a currently heartbreaking situation. Some ideas you can do to help these captivating creatures is volunteer your time to environmental charities, help fight climate change by reducing your carbon footprint, raise money for an environmental charity, and even fundraising for an arctic expedition. What I enjoyed most about the creation of this project is the process. Specifically the process that I went through with my project. There were challenging moments and situations like when I attached the head and body, finding that they were not proportionate in sizing. For this reason I had to adapt. I did this by adding more to my polar bear's body and reshaping it to a larger scale. I also just restarted the head to make it a better size to be proportional with its body. Through this situation it took some time and a lot of class time for me to get the final outcome of my polar bear’s structure. I was very proud and happy that I was able to overcome this problem that challenged my ceramic and artistic skills, and in the end have a good outcome. Adding the glaze was the final step that really brought my project together and made it really become a polar bear. Starting this course with no experience in ceramics and having this outcome, even with the challenge I faced during the production of this piece, just makes me more happy and excited to see what is to come in the future of this ceramics class.


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