Cayley Baird '07

— Sculpture Major —

Living in a small Minnesota town, seven-year-old Cayley Baird was excited to volunteer at Minneapolis puppet theater Heart of the Beast. Now the PNCA Sculpture major is finishing an internship at Bread and Puppet, the country’s most well-known and critically acclaimed puppet theater, and applying knowledge from her figure drawing classes to work with movement and objects.

She explains, “Through taking Morgan Walker’s figure class and a variety of other classes, I realized that working with the figure was something I wanted to experiment with: working with movement as another route, another way of utilizing objects. And also, the scale of it appealed to me.”

"A Stork Perch," mixed media, 2006

At Bread and Puppet in Vermont, Cayley’s internship involves developing a show that progresses through the summer, using the practice of working collaboratively. Like the famed
puppet theater, Cayley engages social consciousness with her artistic endeavors.

“A good part of my work is politically motivated,” she says. She describes puppetry as “an accessible medium that also communicates a great deal just by the audience having to make associations with fairly abstract things, things that seem disconnected on the surface. Having to reconcile these aspects of the performance makes it much more powerful than just ingesting other media.”

Pacific Northwest College of Art has been an effective incubator of Cayley’s talent, vision, an expressive abilities. She chose PNCA at a time when she didn’t know exactly what to pursue
academically, and found the College’s size, class offerings, location, and the city of Portland to be “a good fit.” But what really inspired Cayley was meeting PNCA instructors when she
visited the campus.

"Yeller," mixed media sculpture, 2006

“I’m glad I went with PNCA,” she says. “It allows for a certain amount of exploration but also really pushes being clear and concise about what we are trying to get across with our work. I feel like it’s very honest and we get very honest feedback. No matter what the work, no matter the content — you know whether it’s effective, whether it’s communicating its intent.”

Performance and time-based art were part of her curriculum in David Eckard’s Intermediate Sculpture class. Audience members in Cayley’s “Participatory Democracy Scavenger Hunt” were each given thirty minutes to hunt down everyday objects: a funnel, a five-pound bag of rice, cayenne pepper, a telephone directory, and others. What started off as a lighthearted scavenger hunt brought home a more sobering message when the participants returned. Descriptions and news clippings revealed how each of these common objects had been “used by police departments and in places like Abu Ghraib,” as Cayley puts it. She was pleased by the strong responses and feedback she received from her fellow students andfaculty. “That’s one example of my politics and my facility with certain use of materials working out quite effectively.”

Cayley plans to attend graduate school and pursue a career in arts education. “I feel like the classes I’ve taken have prepared me really well,” she says. “It’s been a valuable three years.”

BFA Majors

Communication Design
General Fine Arts
Illustration
Intermedia
Painting
Photography
Printmaking
Sculpture