Soft clay bonds medical students, MFA artists

Five aspiring physicians, five graduate artists. Finding common clay.

“Do you med students make time for music in your lives?” one of the artists asked, seriously.

Tansy Obryant, a ceramicist and candidate for the Master of Fine Arts degree, leads a workshop on pinch pots. (ECU Photos by Bobby Ampezzan)

Instructor Tansy Obryant is a ceramicist in her last year of the MFA degree program at East Carolina University. She led the workshop for the students, for Angela Wells, a professor who leads the graduate programs in the School of Art and Design, and for Dr. Sheena Eagan, an assistant professor in the Department of Bioethics and Interdisciplinary Studies at the Brody School of Medicine.

“You’re going to take your ball of clay and tear off a chunk” to make a handle, Obryant said. “You’re left with a baseball-sized piece of clay, and just kind of whack it into a ball. Hear that nice noise it makes!”

For more than a decade, the medical school has offered students a curricular complement to coursework called Distinction Tracks, three-year programs in leadership (Leaders in INnovative Care, or LINC), research, service or teaching. This summer, a fifth track kicked off — medical humanities and ethics.

“Medical humanities is meant to improve patient care,” said Eagan, who wrote the initial proposal for this track she now directs. “It improves care by giving physicians an empathic perspective grounded in the personhood of the patient, but the other important part is the physicians themselves.”

What prevents clinical burnout isn’t detaching, she teaches students, but caring for patients, connecting to their vulnerabilities.

“If you’re noticing up here,” Obryant said, pointing to the lip of a soft clay pot, “you’re starting to get cracks. Just smooth them with your finger. Cracks are part of pinch pots.”

Fine Arts for Future Physicians

The conventional thinking is that pursuing a medical degree is serious business while an arts degree is a choice to chase a dream, or worse, frivolous.

“Only someone who hasn’t earned an MFA would say this,” Wells said.

Wells’ students spend their days researching and their after hours in the studio. They’re learning how to be commercial artists and bear up under failure. Nearly all are departmental teachers themselves. The motto here, says Wells, is “time on task.” The average workweek is 70 to 80 hours, she said.

Erika Burke, a second-year medical student, holds an unshaped hunk of clay and smiles imagining how she will work with it while blindfolded.

“There’s a commitment and a level of passion here that is mirrored in medicine. It’s just not so strongly associated with us.”

But don’t discount the competitiveness and the determination to be a working professional. Enter pinch pots, a great equalizer.

“Yes, it bothers me,” said Stacy Rodgers, an MFA metalworker who creates contemporary art jewelry, when asked about her pot’s irregular shape. “This is not my medium. I’m in 2D. I work in sheets.”

“I started over if you didn’t notice,” said Angie Gibson, a Brody student interested in emergency medicine.

Together at one table, the medical and the arts students communed over the trick of working with a medium both flexible but stubborn. The soft clay itself seemed to be doing the digging, pulling something true out of its potters.

That’s the spiritual heart of pinch pots, Obryant said, smacking the clay in her hands.

“We are used to buying pots from Walmart or Williams-Sonoma, and they’re smooth and perfectly round,” she said. “We don’t realize it, but over time that creates an anxiety inside of us because everything in our lives is the same, the same, the same.

“Always smooth. Always round. And because we’re having that experience all the time, it’s instructing us to be like it.”

Students Perspectives

The inaugural cohort of medical humanities and ethics track candidates features five students, but next year the cap will double, and so will demand, Eagan expects.

“Medical school is so linear, but the humanities require nonlinear, abstract thinking,” said Sara Nafees. “It’s a good break.”

Second-year medical student Tabeen Zain watches her instructor work with clay. Zain was born with a birth defect that gave her a strong familiarity with hospitals and affinity for the arts and artistic depiction.

“I was born with a birth defect [that] made it hard for me to relate to other people,” said Tabeen Zain. “Ever since I can remember, I’ve loved writing and reading. Then, I was drawn to medicine, but there was no way to connect those two.”

In college she took a medical humanities course, “and I completely fell in love,” so when this track became available she didn’t give it another thought.

Jesse Singh is interested in ethics and hopes to approach medicine holistically, “incorporating the artistic and humanistic.” What’s more, artificial intelligence is going to transform care, he said, and humanism as a variable will only become more important, not less.

Erika Burke is concerned about losing empathy as she moves into clinical care next year.

“There’s an interesting correlation with med students losing empathy as they go through school,” she said. “That’s something I really want to avoid because the primary reason I went into medicine is to be an empathetic doctor. I really want to understand my patients and treat them … not as a collection of symptoms.”

Near the end, Obryant shared that some artists put their wishes down on paper, then set it into the soft clay pot before firing. It turns to smoke, of course, but it also leaves an eternal mark in the clay.

“It’s an offering,” she said. “A way of talking to the universe.”

Campus Cross Pollination

Eliza Landis is an MFA candidate and metalworker. She, like other artists and medical students, was challenged by working with clay. “I do metals. Think about it. It’s very different.”

A week later, it was graphic designer Narges Sedaghat’s turn to lead a workshop. She asked the class to consider the complexity of a future patient. Each one composed of living systems but also, “a place where fears live, where hopes live, where care is required.” How can we aim to heal unless we are practiced at listening?

Sedaghat again asked workshoppers to knead clay, but this time, blindfolded. Gibson, the student who started over in the first class, showed amazing proficiency this time creating a fish the size of a cutting board. She took a photo of it to show Eagan in the hall.

Several students were surprised at the improvement despite the loss of sight.

This process of discovery could go both ways, the artists said.

“When we discussed this collaboration with Angela, the idea was for us to engage our concept work for our thesis with these medical students,” said Eliza Landis, another MFA metalworker. “Stacy [Rodgers] explores the musculature of the heart in her work through piercings. I work a lot with mental health and trauma. We would benefit from access to Brody and the research they’re doing.

“I think it’s a communal thing, or at least can be. It takes courage to cross the table.”