Luke Sheets, BFA ’95, traces his passion for ceramics to a class he took at Ohio Northern University 34 years ago.
“It’s almost a cliche among ceramicists, but the moment I started working with the material, I was hooked,” he said.
Sheets, now professor of art and director of ONU’s School of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences in the Getty College of Arts & Sciences, started at ONU as an undergraduate engineering major with an art minor. But as he worked through his first-year courses, “I realized that art was where my interest was.”
That interest has taken him all over the world. In February, he returned from Thailand where he took part in the Silpakorn Clayworks 2026: Sanam Chandra International Ceramic Art & Design Workshop. In October, 2025, he was selected for the Mehmet Nuri Gocen Foundation’s 12th Ceramic Workshop in Turkey.
Over the years, he has shared his work and learned from other ceramicists all over the U.S. and internationally. He’s lived in, done workshops and residencies in Turkey, Thailand, Denmark, Japan, Botswana, Guatemala, and Czechia (also known as the Czech Republic), and other countries.
“Travel in general will open your eyes and expose you to things that are different than what you assume to be the norm,” he said. “When it comes to art, that’s an opportunity to exchange techniques and learn the nuances that other artists are working with.”
A passport powered by ceramics
Sheets earned his BFA from Ohio Northern and then, his MFA from Bowling Green State University in 2000. After living, teaching, and working in Vermont and Japan, he returned to ONU in 2005.
Travel has always been a crucial part of his life, he said. While still an ONU undergraduate, he spent time in France, Japan, and Italy. “So that was three years when I did international trips and the travel bug just grabbed hold of me,” he said.
He’s fascinated by the physical interplay between different types of clay and the high-heat atmospheres that define their finish.
During the workshop last fall in Turkey, for example, he learned about how artists fired their pieces at a lower temperature than he uses in his own work. “The surface, the forms are all different. I had to adapt my work to that finish, that firing.”
One of the benefits of the workshops and residencies is learning more about how ceramic artists around the world work with their own clay. The Menemen clay around Izmir, Turkey, for example, is smooth and easy to manipulate, but doesn’t have a lot of strength unfired. In Thailand, the clay he used was coarser and sandy with large particles, making it ideal for sculptural pieces.
Bringing the world back to Ada
Sheets’s goal in working with other ceramic artists is not to teach them how to work with their own clay —“they’ve been doing it for millennia”—but to collaborate and learn from them, he said.
“Both Thailand and Turkey were these international workshops where many artists come together and we’re all working on our own thing. We’re mixing and mingling and watching and asking questions about each other’s work.”
In his own teaching, which includes all the three-dimensional studio art courses at Ohio Northern, Sheets uses the techniques he’s learned through workshops—demonstrating and leading by example.
He also brings what he has learned overseas back to art students at ONU. At a Danish residency before a Scandinavian ceramics conference, he helped a Korean artist build a kiln using a Korean technique that utilizes raw clay blocks. When he returned to ONU, “We tore down our wood kiln and proceeded to build a new one that used a similar approach.”
Based on the many international contacts he’s made, he’s also hoping to plan exchange programs for art students.
A personal connection to his craft
While Sheets enjoys all forms of ceramics, he is especially interested in the wood-fired technique used in Echizen and Suzu, Japan.
He is also continuing his own research. “Glaze chemistry is one of my interests and I’ve been experimenting with crystalline glazes.” These glazes, he explained, develop crystals as the piece cools.
With all his travels, Sheets has some favorite places. “I have a strong attachment to Czechia. It’s where my wife and I eloped.”
His own current administrative duties don’t leave him as much time as he would like to create, Sheets said, so he appreciates the opportunities he gets at conferences and workshops. “As a maker, I need to make things. So, these international opportunities are a little surrogate—a fix for that.”