It was during a college art class that Amy Beth Harrison (Post Baccalaureate Certificate '07) first laid her hands on clay and knew she had found her medium. “It was so soft and malleable, so responsive,” she recalls. “I’ve tried other forms of sculpture, like woodworking and metal, but clay is more forgiving. You can shape it into whatever you want.”

For Harrison that has meant abstract landscapes: deeply textured wall sculptures in rich browns and terracottas that evoke fields, trees, stones, and undulating hills. Her other work has taken the landscape connection even further: at Brigham Young University, where she earned a BFA, and then during a residency at the Houston Center for Contemporary Craft, she created amulets and curling sculptures that hung from trees. “I’ve always been attracted to natural beauty,” Harrison says. “I grew up in suburbia—it was basically a cement parking lot—so anytime I found green space I’d get really excited.”

When it came to Harrison’s childhood interest in art, it was her parents, especially her mother, who got excited. “My mom was criticized when she was a kid for not being able to draw,” Harrison says. Then her mother died when Harrison was 16. As an artist, Harrison says, “I feel like I’m living my mom’s dream a little bit, living it for her.”

Harrison’s own dream has brought her to the Museum School, where for the next year she plans to continue her work in ceramics; to branch out into glass, photography, and papermaking; and to apply to graduate school. It’s a tall order. But part of what drives Harrison is her Mormon faith, which helps her, she says, to always try to be a better person. “The best artists have a strong sense of self, because art is about personal vision,” she says. “I’m my strongest self when I do art. I am that better person.”