Sylvia Ramachandran Skeen (BA ’95), a new professor of sculpture and ceramics at BYU, wasn’t supposed to be an artist. “I should have been a science major,” she says. That tension lies at the heart of her Dream Machines collection, displayed on campus during Skeen’s time as a visiting artist at BYU in 2022. It’s a project she still adds to.
In each piece, Skeen blends the tangible—clay, machine parts, and photographs of real people—with intangible ideas, like dreams and monsters. She “wanted to make the nonphysical aspects of those stories . . . feel more real by making them textural,” Skeen explains. “[I want] to make people intuitively think about what is the most real to them.”
That duality is something Skeen has experienced first-hand. She didn’t switch to an art major until she was a senior—a decision she describes as terrifying, especially since art didn’t come as naturally to her as more “rational” disciplines. Still, prompted by the intangible voice of the Spirit, Skeen chose art. Just as changing course was scary but still right, Skeen explains, art unlocks the sometimes-frightening language of the intangible: creativity can “do a unique good in the world. . . . Everybody has creativity in different forms,” she says. “Art can be a gateway into valuing the spiritual.”
