All that glitters definitely isn’t gold, as one will see in three-dimensional ceramic artist Eric Clark’s exhibit “Some Assembly Required.”

The exhibit will feature industrial pieces formed from clay that are fashioned to look like they are made of plastic and precious metals by being coated in special glazes.

Eric Clark is a graduate student at Georgia Southern University and hopes to earn his MFA in three-dimensional artwork. This exhibit marks his submission into the first of GSU’s MFA exhibitions in March.

Clark said he is playing along the ideas of materialism, and thinks it’s really about presenting a material in a new way and speaking to the contemporary idea. He said he is also playing with the idea of this handmade object versus this mass-produced, industrial item and that’s probably the most important thing.

It’s just mud, essentially, Clark said. So he’s taking something that has a really small amount of value, or maybe no value at all. Clark is trying to raise it to a level of something that is quite expensive. All the works he’s presenting are artificial recreations of something he’s familiar with. In our society, everything is artificial. It’s not good or bad necessarily, but there’s humor in it in a way, Clark said.

Clark is a Savannah native and received his BFA from Armstrong Atlantic State University in visual arts in 2010. Clark has previously exhibited his artwork in galleries in England, North Carolina and Virginia and received the Best in Show Award at Chowan University‘s Annual Juried Art Exhibition in 2013.

“I think a younger audience will appreciate my work probably more so than an older audience. I think that to get young people’s attention things have to be interesting to look at for more than a second.  If I could make someone college-aged be interested in ceramics, I’ve done my job,” Clark said.

“Some Assembly Required” will be featured in Georgia Southern University’s MFA exhibit, which will last from March 3-13.