Christina Varney is the Supervisor of Laboratory Services and a part-time lecturer at Eastern Michigan University. She manages the undergraduate laboratories and ensures everything goes as planned, from getting the equipment ready to watching over people teaching lab classes.
Varney is also one of the artists whose work was selected for inclusion in this year's student-produced arts and literary magazine Cellar Roots.
Before she started her current job, Varney was a graduate student and teacher's assistant. She has always enjoyed getting to see students understand subjects.
Christine Varney is a part-time lecturer in science, and a student in art at Eastern Michigan University. Her 3D artwork was selected for inclusion in the 51st edition of Cellar Roots, the annual arts and literature magazine curated and published by Eastern Michigan University's student media team. (Courtesy of EMU)
“I mean, it's chemistry, so let's be fair,” Varney said. “Not everybody wants to be in a chemistry class, but I love watching them get it. The last class I taught was an organic chemistry lab, and I like to see them actually understand it, because they come in scared.”
Varney said science can be scary for some people, and she wants help them enjoy it as much as possible. She said that watching students learn is a wonderful thing, and that is what influenced her to take up teaching as a part-time lecturer and later accept the job as Supervisor of Laboratory Services.
Varney usually recommends that her students take an art or music class in addition to their science courses because of the creative skills they can get from art and music.
“If they want to find creative solutions to problems, they have to find ways to be creative in subjects other than science,” Varney said.
In her first venture into art, Varney took a metal pouring class, which was a sculpture class for non-majors. During the class, a graduate student approached her to say that she was good at the work and should continue going into art.
After taking a few more art classes, Varney signed up for a Fine Arts: 3D Media Concentration degree. During that time, she created three relief panels for metal pouring at the Parsons Center for Arts and Sciences.
Varney said the most interesting part of those classes was that she worked with her hands. Even if she has only done a handful of projects, she has had the opportunity to turn her vision into a reality and put it out into the world.
Her first art project published in Cellar Roots, titled “Bug," was her first-ever wood project. The idea came to Varney when she was learning about joinery, which is the process of combining pieces of wood or other parts of engineered lumber into more complicated items. Though it was nice to make her own furniture, she said, Varney wanted to make something different.
“I didn't know what I wanted to do,” Varney said. “I was actually at a friend's house before a party, and I was watching a show called 'Sanctuary.' There was this huge sea spider that came out of the ocean, and I thought the legs were amazing. And I'm like, 'Wow! What if I made a table with legs like that and made it look like it was moving?”
By then, her instructor told her class about Cellar Roots and how every available artist should submit a project. At first, Varney said, she was tentative about submitting her work.
“I thought, well, should I do that? Because even though I'm a student, I'm also an employee here," Varney said. "I don't want to take any kind of money that any student could win for school or anything like that, so I wouldn't put it in anything else.”
However, after some encouragement from her 3D art instructors and asking some of her friends for advice, she submitted her project to Cellar Roots.
Today, Varney is taking more wood classes, learning veneering and thinking of new ideas for bug-related projects as she works toward a Bachelor’s degree for the Fine Arts: 3D Media Concentration major. This will be her second Bachelor’s.
For students who are struggling to take their first steps into creating art and making their thoughts a reality, Varney offers some advice: let go of the fear and give it a try.
“When I tell them they should take an art class, they’re like, 'Oh, I'm not good at it, I'm not like that,'" Varney said. “That's not what matters. What matters is how you express yourself and if you enjoy it. And if you let go of the preconceived notion that you're good or bad at something and just enjoy it and let your creativity out, you're going to have a lot of fun.”
The Eastern Michigan University Student Media team released the 51st edition of Cellar Roots in March. The team is hosted a launch party for the magazine and an opening night reception for a gallery exhibit of the works included from 6 to 9 p.m. Thursday, April 3 at the Student Media Center.
Visit the Cellar Roots website for more information.
