“It started with fear,” says Ryan W. Moffett (MA ’05). “Everybody I knew with MS was in a wheelchair.”
Moffett, a ceramics teacher at Murray High School, stands in his art studio next to one of his sculptures—a large, ceramic torso and head with minimal details. It’s one of a series that he created in the wake of learning he had multiple sclerosis in 2013. Moffett titled the sculpture Demyelination, after the nervous system–eroding process that occurs with MS. The sculpture is inspired by Bronze Age statues made by island dwellers in the Aegean Sea, but it also departs from the traditional: the top left chunk of the head is cleanly cut away where the brain should be, and a frayed electrical cord protrudes from the right half. Read more here.