Why I Made It: Titanium
By Danny McDonnell ’26
Commonwealth students have always enjoyed blurring the lines between art and science, and perhaps no class better captures that ethos than The Art and Science (or is it The Science and Art?) of Materials, an elective taught every other year by ceramics teacher Kyla Toomey and chemistry teacher John Wolff. Here, one of their most recent students, Danny McDonnell ’26, reflects on his final project, a wreath of titanium engineered to capture the light.
Titanium is three things: experimental data from a research project given life, an exploration of abstraction, and my attempt at making real color. Each rectangle in the piece is a sample of titanium, used to collect data for a class called The Science and Art of Materials. This project started back in March, as I began thinking of what I wanted to research for the end of the year. Previously, I had done a different project for this class that had gone horribly wrong, and I needed to try something new. In that project, I had been trying to figure out how to make a real red pigment called cochineal (a historical source of red dye from a bug), but in the end I had only been able to make a dullish purple-pink. I was looking to make something very saturated, and I wanted to try again.
The project I chose involved exploring a process called titanium anodization, which involves putting each titanium sample into a saltwater bath and running electricity through it. This forms a thin transparent layer of titanium dioxide. Light plays with the transparent surface in different ways, allowing it to appear in certain colors. As the voltage through the circuit is increased, the thickness of the oxide layer increases, which actually changes the color of the titanium. Long story short: I was able to change the color of the titanium with electricity. My project explored how different surface finishes of the titanium (like polishing or chemically reacting the titanium) affected its color—but secretly, it had the same goal as my previously failed project. I wanted to make the most saturated color I could.
As well as being a research project, Titanium is one of my first abstract pieces of art that felt intentional. Abstract art is weird; it doesn’t have the same need for a careful study of proportions or shading—or any actual depiction—as realistic drawing or painting. I had only worked with realism before this year, and unfortunately the one main rule in the Materials class was “no representation.” Over the course of the year, I thought more and more about abstraction, eventually coming to realize how different compositions of patterns, shapes, and colors could all come together to play with the feeling of a piece. Titanium didn’t need to depict anything in particular; it just needed some emotion behind it, something to think about. The theme holding it together was color: that was my inspiration and the idea I wanted to highlight in its composition.
Which brings me back to the actual form: a circle—or rather, a color wheel. The wheel is made up of all of the sample titanium pieces, no longer used for research but instead overlapping and flowing together to make a gradient. Since the start of the project, I knew I wanted to make some sort of three-dimensional, wave-like effect with the tiles to highlight the reflectivity of the titanium. My initial plan was to make a diamond instead of a circle, with the pieces all aligned together, the texture reminiscent of a mermaid’s tail. By the end, the circle actually made more sense to me: it would be a literal color wheel that showed how different hues combine to form a harmonious whole. A circle brought all of the pieces together in a way that separated them from the science and formed something new, scattering the color in all directions. In the final circle, the pieces aren’t orderly anymore, so you can see completely different colors from different angles. In a way, this is almost like my scientific exploration of surface textures: just like how changing the texture of each individual sample can make the color brighter, changing the texture of the entire circle can make it feel more vivid and whole.
Art, at least my current definition of it, is a translation of an idea from the artist to the viewer. I’m still thinking about art and about how to put realism and abstraction together—is one of them more real? I have much more to discover about the vast world of art, but I’m glad Titanium was my first step into abstraction and a wider exploration of color.