Sculpting the Bones of the Future
by Paul De Angelis

Interdisciplinary learning has fascinated Red Hook art teacher Julia Shultis since at least the time she wrote her SUNY New Paltz thesis on the subject. This past October she and science teacher Ken Erb had an opportunity to put this vision into practice when Erb had the idea that juniors and seniors at Red Hook High could work together to create an evolved human skeleton out of ceramic bones.

While Shultis and her art students supplied the materials, tools, and technique, they relied on Erb and his anatomy students for details about specific bones and bone structures. Pairs of students were assigned specific bones to design and sculpt by drawing from a hat the name of one of 18 major bone structures. Class discussion focused on the historical record of bones and ceramics found during digs and on their similarities in density, texture, durability: that both age in similar ways, becoming more brittle and liable to break, and how ceramics are increasingly being used as medical prosthetics in humans. Besides Shultis and Erb, other instructors included art education teacher Kevin Govia and retired history and anthropology teacher Richard Walker, who returned for a special presentation about the evolution of the human skeleton over the millennia and its bearing on the earliest ceramics recovered from archaeological digs.

The students were tasked with drawing their individual bone structure both as it exists today and as they believed in might evolve over the next 100,000 years, and then sculpt the bones based on the drawing, with a hole to allow for later assemblage. Throughout the sessions, ceramics and anatomy students taught one another, in the process creating fact cards for a game of Jeopardy that featured technical knowledge about clay, anatomy, and evolution. While the ceramic bones were drying and being fired, student teams gave presentations about each “evolved” bone: its name, some facts about it, something about its “evolved state”, as well as their experience working with the clay.

Red Hook High student Kristen Nugent shows off the ceramic bone she created.

The student reports on the project make for fascinating reading. Some, predictably, had problems with the clay drying too fast or at variable rates. The spine team at first planned to sculpt all 33 vertebrae individually, but when that proved a little hard to accomplish, they settled for fewer (justified, it turned out, by their plan for vertebral evolution); both they and the rib group predicted their parts would thicken over the coming millennia. The hand people struggled to combine stylistic varied finger styles into a unit and did not seem to be able to decide whether, over evolutionary time, hands would get bigger or smaller and whether or not we’d lose a finger, though at least one predicted that multiple wrist bones might fuse into a single structure. Students working on a lower part of the body complained that “the pelvis was an awkward shape and hard to keep in place.”

All the students I talked to were enthusiastic about the hands-on nature of the project. For the ceramics students, it was an opportunity to explore the wider implications of their art—though no one has yet been inspired to consider becoming a pre-med student in college. For the anatomy students, it was a chance to touch the object of their study rather than simply consider it abstractly. As for the teachers: they can’t wait to try it again next year!