STORY: Sculpting the Future: Dyllan Nguyen’s Journey as an Artist and Educator
Read all about Fabrication Specialist and Instructor, Dyllan Nguyen's journey as an artist and educator, and learn how they're sculpting the future at Olin.
In 2015 when Boston experienced a series of snowstorms, Dyllan Nguyen was teaching a woodworking class at Murphy School in Dorchester through a partnership with The Eliot School of Fine and Applied Arts. Between the weather and holidays, they were unable to meet with their elementary and middle school students for almost two months, which drastically changed the flow of their classes.
With only two weeks of the session left, Dyllan decided the class project would be making ping pong paddles, where the students would spend one or two classes creating them, and then the last day of the session playing with the paddles and imagining new games to play.
What was expected to be a simple project led to a storm of frustration and tears among the students.
Dyllan Nguyen, fabrication specialist and instructor, is shown in the Olin Shop.
“What I found was that the difference between the vision that six and seven-year-olds have and their expectations of what an object is supposed to be like, and their motor skills and ability to produce that object, were much further apart than we were really prepared to process and deal with,” says Dyllan, who has been a fabrication specialist and instructor at Olin since 2023.
“It led to conversations with really young students about what our expectations are of any objects that we make or other people, and then how can we reflect differences and what does that mean when we have these things going on.”
While it was challenging at first, the project developed into an important lesson for Dyllan to teach in their subsequent courses: how we can lean into mistakes and not view them as such but see them as features of the item being created.
By 2024, Dyllan used this lesson in other classes, workshops, and development sessions. Additionally, in collaboration with ArtLab and Harvard Ed Portal, they showcased an art exhibit based on the project at the Crossings Gallery called “Fair Play,” which opened in October 2024. The lesson has helped participants think about objects differently, what it means for them to be functional, and how we bridge differences as people.
Utilizing their experience as an artist and educator, Dyllan has helped students and workshop participants experiment and create new games while exploring how fun helps them learn, reduce stress, and relate to themselves and others. While in the Studio for Interrelated Media Program at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Dyllan met Brooke Scibelli. Together, they opened the Non Issue Studio in 2016, where they create handmade objects using wood, felts, and fibers, with topics often addressing distraction, communication, and relationships between people and objects.
“I don't know if I really think about art as being a passion as much as it's just part of who I am,” says Dyllan. “Living in a world that's really consumer-oriented, having opportunities to create and affect the world around you can help people build agency and be more connected to their existence and physical space.”
Accessibility to creative spaces is essential for individuals to become artists and skilled professionals, but not everyone has the same amount of access to tools or materials, or the educational art experiences, such as museums and other cultural institutions. As an educator who cares about supporting their students at every stage, Dyllan recognizes the care that goes into building accessible artistic and technical spaces, especially for shops that are historically homogeneous.
Dyllan Nguyen works in the Olin Wood Shop.
“I teach mostly sculptural classes here, and I've definitely had people ask why an engineer would need to know anything about sculpture,” says Dyllan.
“It’s not so much that anyone needs that specific thing, but more so that it's a space for them to think differently about what they're interested in and maybe apply technical skills that they have or would like to build to a very different context. I think there's a lot of self-discovery in that.”
In addition to hosting workshops and developing their own projects and workshops off campus, Dyllan hopes to continue creating opportunities for students to complete projects they are passionate about.
“I'm actually really inspired by my students, and that's a really special thing for me,” says Dyllan. “It's very much why I'm interested in teaching and working with people who want to do creative things; you need support and exposure to know that things exist in the world.”
