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This week’s guest, Ben Minnis, sees human faces in the abstract. Ben is an early childhood educator turned sculptor from Eugene, OR. He now runs huMinnist sculpture. His heavy focus on material languages for young children has inspired how he approaches his art - he has a dialogue with the clay until the conversation ends.

You’ll learn from Ben the importance of living in the moment and losing inhibitions around the myriad of ways to learn and experience meaning in life. As we grow into adulthood, learning and expressing through movement, poetry, or music, for example, is conditioned out of us as we focus on excelling at reading, writing, and arithmetic. While those forms of education are important, it’s also important, as Ben says, to “be the ant.”

Be present in the moment and focus on the task at hand to unburden yourself from human trappings.

It’s possible to process our experiences through outlets with materials from the Earth, such as clay, and to find peace with letting your creative inner world be exposed. Ben tells us how he has done this in his past.

The limits we place on ourselves are oftentimes man made through societal pressure, which we can release and expand beyond if we let ourselves. This is one way art contributes to the improvement of our lives - it helps us think and process our experiences as the meaning of those experiences evolves.

Ben’s clay sculptures evolve in much the same way as our human experiences and represents them in a unique and thought-provoking way.