Digital Commons Network^™

To The Dogs Or Whoever, Jacqueline Walker

Masters Theses

My creative process is inspired by the natural world and its inevitable conflict with humans. Through intricately layered screen prints, repurposed furniture, or reimagined animal hides, I craft narratives depicting the complex interactions between animals and humans, examining their conflict and the ensuing consequences. I weave layers of information and symbolism from natural history, behavioral ecology, music, and personal experience into each piece. This thesis explores my artistic practice, discussing its underlying values, and examining the influences and stories behind each piece. Focusing on the narrative of the animal, my body of work strives to cultivate empathy towards them and …

Unruly And Unresolved: A Shared, Precarious Survival, Sara Inacio

Masters Theses

I'm just a little rat trying to survive,

To exist and not be perceived.

Building a home,

In a place unnatural to me.

Destroyed and rebuilt again,

I've learned to live in the toxic world you've created.

In a world that is not made for my belonging, I’ve had to find my way, to exist and build with what’s within reach. Such a constant state of construction feels oddly familiar and comfortable to me, home is always in the process of becoming. As I build, I think about how the home building process always takes up the space of others, …

Always Been This Way, Joanna Booth

Masters Theses

Always Been This Way is an exploration of the layers of self that become embedded within the home. My work seeks to explore themes of preser- vation and how I, as an artist, can document and solidify my personal and familial stories which are often created within the home. For my thesis, I have incorporated a combination of printmaking, textiles, furniture design, and performance as an examination of the generational information found inside the domestic space.

Hearts And Minds, Steven Knapp

Masters Theses

This thesis is an exploration of how lived experiences, a sense of dark humor, and creativity translate into my studio practice. Through images, material exploration and pointed interactions with the audience I encourage people to embrace nuanced views of difficult topics that exist in our world.

Translational Placemaking: The Diasporic Archive, Alia Varawalla

Masters Theses

Globalization and mass migration has propelled a hybrid existence, as individuals that occupy multiple geographies we live in a constant state of translation. Our museums and cultural institutions are in opposition to this; static, preserved and de-contextualized. At the intersection of printmaking and architecture, this thesis proposes a living archive to document the collective migratory journey across sites, materials, and hybrid identities. A network of centers for knowledge sharing and production centered on India and its diaspora. As art practices and people migrate, cultural production evolves with its context, gaining new meaning as it changes hands generationally and globally.

I Buried The Fireworks Under The Tree, Sihan Zhu

Masters Theses

Unreachable memories always surround me. I've been trying to extract logical parts from my chaotic memories, hoping to find a connection with the world within the soundless, intangible black fireworks stored in my retina under the grand fireworks display. When I first encountered intaglio printmaking, I impulsively drew subconscious memories on the plate, arranging them along some chaotic storylines. Gradually, I realized that I needed to create my own logical structure. So I started using specific visual symbols and repeating them, using the repetition of the printmaking process to search for logical clues. Printmaking with its special rhythm allowed me …

One More Time, I Love You —— 我有所念人，隔在远远乡, Jingjing Yang

Masters Theses

"One More Time, I Love You ——我有所念人，隔在远远乡" is a thesis project that delves into the profound nature of "obsession," which surpasses the boundaries of life and death, as well as the mortal world and the underworld. The interpretation of this type of obsession varies among individuals, and my understanding of it originates from the traditional Chinese myth concerning the afterlife journey. According to this myth, upon departing from the mortal realm, the deceased traverse the Bridge of Helplessness, cross the Forgotten River, peruse their past, present, and future lives on a Three Lives Stone, and then partake in the Soup …

Sometimes Like Butterflies, Edward Steffanni

Masters Theses

Perhaps the most radical thing to do is to embrace the tension, being between the heavens and earth. Maybe regardless of identity, sometimes the earth is not enough but there are moments I’ve experienced where the distance between heaven and earth blurs. These are instants where my troubles do melt like lemon drop: the smell of freshly cut hay in a field nearby, seeing a baby goat’s tail wiggle while he nurses his mother, or making love behind the barn. These are moments on earth when something else comes into focus.

Sapping, Smudging, Staining: A Feminized Body, Breslin Shea Bell

Masters Theses

This book—of poetry, prose, and lists—muses on the effects of liquidity and leakiness of a feminized body. By bringing echo narrative, illegibility, de-telling, and that which is continuously wet to the viewer’s body and space, this book and accompanying multimedia installation provides a lens to consider reproductive rights, body autonomy, and gender-based aggression and violence. Work of matter and color investigates interiority, both bodily and spatial, as it relates to surface, access, and space-making.

Prepositions, Alexis Hill

Masters Theses

My work is a conscious engagement with traditions of process art that emphasize making over outcome and the desire to create art that cannot be predetermined. The art objects are primarily a by-product of engagement with my material reality. This is hard to pin down and harder to talk about. Historian Kim Grant’s introduction to the circular and sometimes impenetrable creative process is a good summation of one of the essential problems of my art [school] experience: “The artist’s hard work often takes place without a clearly denied goal, thereby rendering the artist’s labors endless, and any results resistant to …

All Bodies Wander, Haley Mackeil

Masters Theses

This thesis describes how aspects of the environment can evoke the presence of a living organism. It discusses several projects by Haley MacKeil that are based on research within the natural world that includes documentation of sites, processes, installations, and artifacts made through video, glass, and papermaking. MacKeil’s practice forms a threshold between two worlds, two bodies, two different understandings—it creates sites for connections with something, someone, or a place that cannot be directly accessed.

El Suelo En Duelo, Mariana Ramos Ortiz

Masters Theses

This is a thesis about colonialism.

When I was seven years old I interrogated my mom about the consequences of Puerto Rico achieving its independence from the United States. I remember asking her “If Puerto Rico gains its independence, would that mean that we would no longer be able to purchase apples at the store?” The warm climate prohibits apples from growing in Puerto Rico. I never liked apples, and would much rather have had oranges, but I guess that concerned me at that time. She looked at me with a funny look. With that funny look that any parent …

The Things Of Mind, Yini Luo

Masters Theses

My thesis research shows my thinking and reflection on environmental changes around me in the past and especially the past two years. Through the experience between the city and nature, my research has clarified my different perspectives and explored the expression and reproduction through the print media and glass media.

Storytelling In Arts, Lindi Shi

Masters Theses

People and narratives are the core of my art practice. Compared with only exploring the subject matter, I am more excited about the characters and narratives around it. My media gradually shifts from flat drawings or prints to installation, performance, and even explosions. Perhaps as a human myself, I like people a lot. There are always interesting stories where people go. The thesis discusses four stories, including an oral tale from my grandma, my personal experience, stories about bodies, and a story in the imagination. This writing reflects my research on the relationship between types of storytelling and various art …

Let Us For Once Try To Not Be Right, Merrick Adams

Masters Theses

Through a series of letters, the author discusses memory, representation, and the process and meaning of printmaking.

Recipes, Camille Chew

Masters Theses

Ingredients and materials can be manipulated and combined to create something new-a transformation akin to alchemy. Vegetables are chopped and brewed into soup; clay is glazed and fired into sculpture; flour. sugar. butter and eggs bake into a cake; ink is pressed into paper to make prints. These processes are acts of magic that are performed in kitchens and studios every day.

After spending all day working in the print shop, I always feel most refreshed and contented once I've cooked a meal and sat down to enjoy it. This past year I began bringing baked goods to class crits …

Things That Grew While I Looked At The Ground, Heather Mcmordie

Masters Theses

Broadly speaking, I am interested in the role of fine arts in translating the complexities of natural systems. This particular body of work explores the relationship between printmaking and soil science—just one of the many possible relationships between arts and sciences—with a focus on salt marsh soil systems. Generating public interest soil systems and other hidden ecological systems can be difficult due to the opaqueness of language and concepts surrounding these systems and a perceived distance (physically or conceptually) from the general public. Printmaking—with its inherent multiplicity, mediation, and readability—offers opportunities for making the seeming abstraction of soils evocative and …

Rootless, Lilla Szekely

Masters Theses

This thesis is an attempt to understand the relationship of my art to nature and my sense of rootlessness. I have been imprinted by the places I have lived in yet disconnected from them as well. I am often situated on the 'other side' and as my perspective has learned to shift between the global and the local, between the outsider and insider gaze, I have come to describe this ability as being 'rootless'. I believe this condition is more common in America, the country of immigrants than anywhere else. Our memories are often re-told in the form of stories …

Art Beside A Single Handshake : Can You Believe It?, Tongji Qian

Masters Theses

Although I was familiar with works by both McKinzie and Phil, their prints still caught my attention during the Printmaking Graduate Biennial at Rhode Island School of Design in January 2019. In contrast to the numerous talented artists who employed strategies to affirm the relevancy of printmaking in a contemporary discourse, McKinzie and Phil seemed to desire something different. Their collaboration series of Ten Identical Prints was predictably “printerly” and perilously unexciting, betraying a fraught and commonplace relationship between an expressive artist and a scrupulous master printer. How could these two artists showcase such mundanity? What was the stake of …

In Between, Frida Baranek, Special Collections, Fleet Library

Printmaking

42 pages ; 28 cm + 16 portfolios (samples ; 28 cm). 1 box, 16 portfolios. Title from title page of text booklet. Housed in a cloth-covered drop-spine portfolio box (30 x 24 x 5 cm) with paper label on spine Portfolio contains a text booklet (42 pages) plus 16 specimens of handmade paper in individual white paper folders with letterpress identifying each artist. Text booklet contains artists' statements and biographical information. Contents: Amalia Avilés-Lugo -- Anna Hendrick Karpatkin Benjamin -- Hannah O'Hare Bennett -- Jenna Bonistalli -- Elena Bordacconi -- Lesa Hepburn -- Julie L. Johnson -- Danae Lagoy …

Human Artist, Nicholas Costantino

Masters Theses

This Artist Book details the author's thoughts on being an artist, his studio practice, and being human.

Supposing Truth Is A Woman, Chloe Wilwerding

Masters Theses

This unbound print portfolio documents the author's spiritual search for meaning through text and image.

Defining Contagion : Examining Imagination As A Source Of The Infection In Print Studios, Joshua Tangen

Masters Theses

In this thesis, I attempted to define a contagious component of art education within a community print shop. In this quest, I examine theories around imagination, creativity, and psychology through an analysis of the work of Maxine Greene, Kieran Egan, Ken Robinson, and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Gathered from a variety of sources that include, books, scholarly articles, and online video, I link Greene’s concepts of what role imagination plays in critical thinking and empathy, Egan’s promotion of imagination’s ability to create personal and emotional engagement, Robinson’s ideas about creativity in learning, and Csikszentmihayli’s theory of flow. Connecting these four philosophers are …

Sky Well, Molly Kaderka

Masters Theses

Since the era of Romanticism, landscape painting has fallen into three aesthetic forms of representation: the Pastoral, the Picturesque, and the Sublime. This last form celebrates the awe and fear that arises through human encounters with nature. Many contemporary critics dismiss the Natural Sublime, claiming either that technology has replaced nature as a source of the sublime, or that humankind’s present-day destruction of nature prevents our also standing in awe of it. I disagree with both arguments. To me, humanity’s disruption of Earth’s ecosystems does not impede an individual’s experience of exhilaration witnessing, say, a volcanic eruption. And modern technology …

Matriarchy, M. Camila Escobar Vélez

Masters Theses

This book collects my personal and artistic process since I got to the United States two years ago. My cultural and religious background is the foundation for my artistic explorations. This book collects theoretical references and personal stories that explore the impact of Catholicism on my personal life especially as a woman.

Ghost, A Stone, Audrey Blood

Masters Theses

This is a book of cement and paper. It addresses questions of surface, self, interior, and relations with the environment. It points to emotional and affective geographies in the context of printmaking.

Four Projects, K. Sarrantonio

Masters Theses

This thesis gives an overview of the author's inspirations and art practices and specifically surveys four projects that launched video projection work. The simple descriptions of the projects are accompanied by silkscreen prints taken from stills of the work.

The Contested Landscapes Of Mnemosyne : Constructing Maps Of Memory, Valeria Rachel Herrera

Masters Theses

This is an unbound portfolio UV printed on plexiglass containing fragments and scenes from my master’s thesis The Contested Landscapes of Mnemosyne - Constructing Maps of Memory.

Na'aseh : Ritual In Practice, Anna Henrick Karpatkin Benjamin

Masters Theses

This body of work is an exploration of Jewish identity through pattern and ritual. Pattern is used as a tool to question and reinterpret these actions. Drawings, prints and papercuts are created through repetitive and evolutionary actions performed over time.

Every Change, Ruhan Feng

Masters Theses

After being away from home for six years, distance and time make me reconsider: “Who am I?”

This thesis is an honest memoir, which records my reflections about life through my struggles, confusion with cultural identities, and conflicts with my mother in a one-child family. In a two-year graduate program, I continue to explore my identities as Chinese, an international student, an expatriate, and a daughter.

The text, accompanied by illustrations, interprets personal artistic changes. Printmaking in my work is not just a tool to make multiples. The ideas of layering and repeating are also applied to my three-dimensional installations …