Alum Kayla Erickson, Mike Tuttle and Emporia resident Taumi Feil look at the detailed work on a sculpture by Grant Charpentier during the opening of his senior show, “Under My Skin,” Friday night in the Gilson Gallery in King Hall. The show will be on display until Jan. 27. Kellen Jenkins/ The Bulletin

The hairy, spiny forms that make up Grant Charpentier’s senior show “Under My Skin” are what he calls “scary, but original.” The Gilson Gallery in King Hall will be full of these animal-inspired figures until Jan. 27.

“This is something that I’ve never seen before, something I can call my own,” said Charpentier, senior glass forming major. “I was thinking about doing a sea theme but there are hundreds of artists out there who can do a sea theme and do it two times better than I could. This is something I’m willing to bet isn’t out there.”

Charpentier took inspiration from animal forms.

“I first came across this form looking at different skeletal forms in various reptiles,” he said. “I wanted to use glass in a minimalist way to embrace the form instead of dominating it.”

While some of the pieces are hard and uninviting, they didn’t start out that way.

“They started off pretty fluffy and nice,” Charpentier said. “Centipedeish – and then as time went on, the process got really monotonous and my emotions began to come out, even though they may have been negative. They started becoming more aggressive and agitated so my emotions started to transcribe through the work.”

Many people attended the opening of “Under My Skin” last Friday, including Charpentier’s girlfriend’s parents, who drove 7 hours to be there.

“Grant is like a sponge,” said Tracy Webber, Newman, Colo., resident and mother of Charpentier’s girlfriend. “He collects everything and sees everything from different sides.”

Charpentier wanted the viewers of his show to feel some of the angry emotions he put into each piece.

“I wanted to create a push/pull relationship with the viewer,” he said. “I wanted the viewer to be interested in them but at the same time be pushed away because they’re dangerous.”

And they really are dangerous. The spines sticking out of the pieces are chunks of pointed glass that Charpentier referred to as “teeth” and bent pieces of thick metal.

“What I like about the art is how alive they look and ferocious in manner,” said Collin Haire, junior art major. “They just pop out at you. They’re almost moving.”

Haire understood the message Charpentier was trying to get across.

“In his artist statement, he mentioned that he used the skeletal structure of snakes,” Haire said. “I definitely see that. They are like mutant centipedes.”

Charpentier did not want to just show glass pieces.

“I feel different about them all,” Charpentier said when trying to describe his favorite. “I’m a glass major but I wanted to do something different. I wanted to stray away from just showing glass and showing other types of medias.”

For Charpentier, the work of putting together one piece was painstaking and took several hours.

“I don’t consider myself and OCD artist,” he said. “But this is really repetitious with little variation.”

The use of metal in his pieces is what Charpentier thought was original about them.

“Obviously there is a lot of metal work in here,” Charpentier said. “What I like about metal work is that it goes hand in hand with glass. It’s hard work. It’s about problem solving. Things don’t always work out like you want to but you work through it and you come  out on top sometimes and sometimes you don’t.”

Even after spending a lot of time working on the pieces, Charpentier was not sure what to call his collection.

“I was telling my friend about how these were driving me nuts and she said why don’t you just name it under your skin,” Charpentier said.

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