By: Julia Campisano

The beauty of art is often viewed at art museums and fairs, but a talented senior brought her talent from home to school.

“I’ve always done art at home and I usually made things out of polymer clay,” senior Abigail Sheets said. “I even made book covers out of clay and binding. But I got really into art my freshman year in my first 2D art class. I then got into 3D art later around the Holidays because I wanted to make little clay charms for my family at home. And it was always easy to just bake the clay in my oven. The more I did it, the better I got, and the more I liked it.”

Currently, she is working on several projects to enter in the St. James Art Fair, all of which were inspired by art classes, students and teachers here at NAHS.

“Last year I noticed kids working on their clay projects from my class and I always worked with clay from home,” Sheets said. “I wanted to do the most ambitious thing I could and show off my skills without ever taking Ceramics in school (until now). When I started the project I expected it to explode, and it did, but it’s all part of the learning process.”

This human-esque project that exploded has been repaired and is currently being worked on along with her other projects Sheets has created, and she wants all of them to tell a story.

“After we fired my project the first time I had to coat her in wax and put oil paint on top of that. Then I am going to place her on top of books and draw text onto her so that way it shows her story,” Sheets said.

Although Sheets has taken on the challenge of entering contests to show off her creativity, she has received a lot of support at school and at home.

“Mrs. Korte (Ceramics teacher) and my mom are my main supporters,” Sheets said. “Even though Korte hasn’t seen all of my projects that I’ve done from home, she still pushes me to do my best on my artwork. My mom also supports me and she has seen all of my projects from the beginning, when I started using clay at home.”

Though Abigail loves doing her art, she does not plan on continuing art for a career choice.

“I’ll always do art from home, but I don’t want to pursue art as a career. Right now I want to be an air traffic controller, but I’ll never stop doing art. It’ll always be important to me. Plus it’s won me a great deal of money so far.”