Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Fableware From The Garden Of The Grotesque, Matt Becker

Masters Theses

In biology, a chimaera is created when two zygotes collide at an early stage of development, resulting in a unique creature containing two distinct sets of genes. The name is borrowed from Greek mythology where chimaeras are fire-breathing monsters born with the mixed attributes of lions, snakes, and goats. As creatures of myth, chimaera represent a narrative union of disparate parts; a collision of the fantastic and the mundane.

Clay can be used to explore this dichotomy, utilizing its ability as a mutable canvas to embody a vast range of visual vocabularies while referencing its rich history and placing new …

Between Material And Landscape, Martin Mcdermott

Masters Theses

Clay is a binary material. It is soft and malleable and yet becomes as hard as rock when subjected to immense heat. Its responsiveness to manipulation makes it well suited to recording touch in landscapes of surface. Its versatility makes it the ideal material for expressing other types of antipodal concepts: dark and light, banal and profound, temporary and durable. The sculptural objects in this body of work represent many of these contrasts through an investigation of various historical concepts within a broad definition of landscape art. The hollow clay “rocks” reference caves and grottos through apertures in the surface …

Memory: Tangible Decay & Growth, Rebecca J. Buglio

Masters Theses

What if the objects we had as children grew up with us and showed the decay, alterations, and new growth that occurred to us?

Natural sciences focus, in part, on the endless cycle of growth and decay. Through researching this topic, the question of current versus past arose to question how the mind evolves with age. As a ceramic artist, clay offers a memory through touch by taking the shape and form the creator wills it to have while still able to have movement and force of its own through the molecular makeup and processes it goes through in firings. …