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Tailor Made In India: Jaipur's Masters Of Cloth, Doctors Of Clothing, Alisa Weinstein

Dissertations - ALL

This dissertation is about Jaipur’s tailors, making custom-crafted clothing for individual customers in a rapidly changing and globally fashion-informed India. Indian-crafted clothing and textiles are a source of pride domestically and have long been used and admired throughout the world. So how is that India’s tailors, the people whose knowledge, abilities, and hard work form the backbone of this industry, receive so little thought or recognition? Although tailors are a seemingly well-respected and integral part of shaping Jaipur’s cultural landscape, my inquiries often revealed that tailors and their labor are popularly characterized as mundane. While considerable attention gets paid to …

In Search Of Meaning, Fabiano Sarra

Theses

When I came across the book Baskets and Basket Makers in Southern Appalachia, I felt a deep reverence for the craft of basketry that marked the beginning of my thesis research. What started as a new discovery for generating volume led to a search for an intangible essence that emanated from these objects. The baskets in that book had a certain feel to them, they had a soul, a proof of existence and a life of utility. Their honest radiance transports the viewer to a different time and place, drawing visual connections with the maker who crafted the object with …

Women And Fiber: The Role Of Craft Traditions In The Transmission Of Cultural History., Brooks Vessels

College of Arts & Sciences Senior Honors Theses

This thesis investigates the role of fiber and historic craft processes in the documentation and transmission of women’s history. It has inspired an original body of artwork that employs such traditional techniques as weaving, quilting, sewing, and dyeing in addition to the contemporary processes of performance art, installation, and video documentation as a means of connecting with a matrilineal line. The research conducted provides examples of women who have used fiber processes as a way to process grief, enact religious rituals, and perform domestic tasks, as well as contemporary artists and art historians who have considered the role of fiber …

Spanning, Mary Katherine Carder-Thompson

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dossier consists of three chapters. Chapter 1 is a comprehensive artist statement describing my system for spirit communication that leverages the latent power of wool processing tools. This system borrows strategies from varied sources including living history, paraconceptualism, and bricolage. Chapter 2 visually documents my studio practice over the two years of my MFA candidacy at Western University. Chapter 3 is a case study of Luanne Martineau’s 2009 drawing, Who are they you salute, and that one after another salute you. This case study addresses Martineau’s engagement with Modernism’s legacy and discusses how her work builds an equitable …

Kiddush Levana, The Moon Is Your Handheld Mirror, Noa Ginzburg

Theses and Dissertations

Noa Ginzburg is weaving cast-off and hand-made objects, lights, reflections, spells, drawings, and an abundance of knots into site-responsive installations. In her thesis, Ginzburg addresses Hieronymus Bosch’s paintings, the synergy of assemblages, repurposing of materials in the era of Anthropocene, and how notions of solidarity and indeterminacy influence her work.

Arts And Craft: Pattern As A Verb, Evan A. Bellantone

Theses and Dissertations

As an honorific term, mastery does not enjoy the same fixity in a fine arts context as it does in the context of arts and crafts. My paintings are a blend of fine art and craft traditions that yield insight into certain ways value is inferred from both.

Finding Balance, Quinn Maher

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Exhibition Statement

Finding Balance is my exploration into the relationship between form, firing, and utility.

In the studio I pay close attention the silhouette of each piece, looking for strong continuous lines in both the positive and negative space accentuating the volume created on the potter’s wheel. I spend time with each piece combing the surface to create texture and reveal the course particles below the surface. As I apply white slip to this textures surface, the high points allow the fluid slip to break and pool in recessed areas creating a layer of depth and variety. The white slip …

Seeing Through Feeling, Christopher Mitchell Rodgers

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this paper is to describe both the inherent formal qualities and conceptual framework that are addressed within the exhibition, Seeing Through Feeling. The exhibition is centered around the methodology of making, collection, and display all through the one singular positioning, the object. The objects within the exhibition are either handmade or collected fragments that weave together around the singular position of craft and history under the pretense of how our understanding of time may not always be true. The thesis breaks down key components through specific themes into the categories of the hand, eye, symbol, object, value, …

At The Risk Of Enchantment, Amy M. Butowicz

Theses and Dissertations

Through a lexicon of painted soft sculptures, salvaged furniture and objects referencing the hand-made, my work explores the absurdity of life through a lens of theatricality. My cast of characters are humanized with both physicality and interiority. The works haptic sensibility creates an oscillation between tangible object and metaphysical presence.

Examining Political Discourse On A Crafting Website, Laura Steibel O'Brien

Graduate Research Theses & Dissertations

Websites dedicated to leisure pursuits are often used to connect with others over a shared interest. Some allow and encourage participants to engage in discussion. This project examined the ways that one crafting website, Ravelry, attempts to maintain civil discourse among its users, as opposed to the sometimes hostile and aggressive interactions found on other sites. The study looked at its discussion moderation practices as its users discussed politics and then analyzed how this related to community norms and practices of civil public discourse. Discourse analysis of words, phrases, and interactions within representative discussion threads suggest that while Ravelry’s guidelines …

Bone Of My Bone, Dylan A. Loftis

Theses and Dissertations

This is a noticing and a return - a good old-fashioned call and response.

An understanding and a becoming.

At present, the noticing is on brokenness and the response on reparation. The work is filtered and guided through my background in traditional woodworking and furniture design.

A lifetime love of comic books, storytelling, and illustration refuses silence, and it escapes in bursts as I work intuitively through design and material. A newly discovered love of writing finds meaning in that intuition.

It’s impossible, even irresponsible, for me to notice and question the brokenness around me without questioning the brokenness within …

Lifetime, Emily E. Kuchenbecker

Theses and Dissertations

Time is my bully. Time marks the start of something, as well as the end. We are all carrying out the inexorable passing of time as it relates to our impending mortalities.

I do not fear death.

The awareness of my body’s impermanence employs me to feel that much more connected to the vessel containing that of which I am.

But what am I? Am I my body- or is it much deeper?

Through the work executed during my graduate research, I have attempted to quantify my existence through the archiving my time and body. This document ushers you through …