A naked body sitting alone on the bed, a plain little ceramic landscape, a my-size peanut butter statue.
For some of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's artists, these objects represent a deeper meaning.
The Open Studio Night, sponsored by the Visual Artists in Practice, was held Friday at Richards Hall from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. UNL students and visitors who attended the event said they were fascinated by the artists' exhibits and the personality reflected in the artwork.
When creating her artwork, Kestrel Lemen, a senior art major with an emphasis in ceramics, said she tried to help her audience broaden their minds.
"(I'm) really interested in having somebody look at my work and then be able to be kind of taken away to a new place," Lemen said.
Caitlin Applegate, a third-year graduate student in art with an emphasis in ceramics, created sculptures for the studio night. One was of a naked woman sitting alone in the middle of her bed with her legs crossed. The bed is enormous when compared to the woman.
"What I'm most interested in is relationships - both personal relationships and interpersonal relationships," Applegate said.
"(The woman in the sculpture is) really involved in her own relationship with her own self. She's long and awkward in a way of putting her self-perception on her outside, so she may feel gangly and concerned about her belly."
The art presented that night also portrayed real people, as it did in Justin Shaw's work.
Shaw, a third-year sculpture graduate student, created three self-portrait sculptures using peanut butter, fake chickens and clay. He said creating these sculptures allowed him to express things he wouldn't normally say out loud.
"A lot of my work right now is revolving around personal issues that I'm dealing a lot with right now," Shaw said. "There are things about you - like I'm overweight. There are these kinds of issues."
Shaw said because he was dealing with overeating, he used the peanut butter, fake chicken and a lazy man to represent his process of coping with those problems.
Rhonda Willers, a third-year art graduate student in ceramics, said she was very interested in chemistry and physics during high school but didn't know what she would do with the knowledge she gained from it - that is, until she started doing ceramics. She learned how to encompass chemistry, physics and engineering in her artwork, she said.
"Now, when I do my ceramic works," Willers said, "a lot of my glaze chemistry deals with the periodic table and understanding elements and the way that they combine … especially in minerals and understanding what each of those color responses occur after using the minerals."
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