Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Bloodlines, Tyler Dallis

Master's Theses

Connections are valuable in everyday life. Bloodlines speaks about my personal connections to my biological, adoptive, and found families, along with my heritage and what it means to be a contemporary Indigenous artist. I am not much of a sentimental person when it comes to physical objects, but I collect memories of the people closest to me. Through the process of collecting memories, I am creating a mental Rolodex of experience, people, things, and events from my life. When building my pieces, I braid these memories into the clay as I coil the form to completion. Embedding them into the …

Everything Changes, Nothing Dies., Olivia S. Stinson

Master's Theses

My recent work directly responds to my current state of being. The past three years have °been the peak of the exploration within myself, learning the capacity of my mind. I’ve spent my time in the heat of trauma, filled with anger and resentment. I’ve spent time in a steady state of confusion, wondering who exactly I am and who I want to be. I am in a constant state of change, thinking deeply about my actions and how I can improve on processing the correlating emotions. Creating a body of work during times when listening to conversations within the …

Human Nature, Mary Robb

Master's Theses

Human Nature explores my personal observations and life experiences through the use of my narrative ceramic sculptures. Anthropomorphism is the attribution of human characteristics or behaviors to non-human entities, such as animals. Some animals are more desirable than others, but all have value and purpose. They exist for a reason. They all bleed. They just want to be. People are like that. I became untrusting of humans after a childhood trauma and began relating more to animals than humans. I observed many similarities in wild animals with my experience. They are continually on alert searching for food and watching for …

Combat Artist, Delvin Goode

Master's Theses

The integral bond that unites the American citizen with the selfless men and women of the Armed Forces will be strengthened through my juxtaposition of uncommonly complementary crafts. “Combat Artist”, featuring high-quality ceramic mugs, unique packaging, pristine painted panels, and kindred graphics will bridge a gap that enhances relationships between these two worlds through a shared love of country and shared culture. The resultant works create fantastic windows into my military life communicating messages full of humor, patriotism, and love. I aspire to masterfully unite ceramic techniques with proven principles of design distributed across all mediums within my work, culminating …

Essence, Fatimah Ali Alhazmy

Master's Theses

Essence

Essence is in the artist's soul, where visions of flowers are transformed into reality through ceramics. The natural beauty of the Arabian jasmine flowers and their distinctive fragrance were very impactful for me at an early age.These flowers fill the air in and around each house. This is what has inspired my current work.These specific flowers were chosen for their harmonious colors, soft curves, and symmetrical formsthat resemble the shape of a woman's body.I create thrown vessels and sculpt forms, then individually attach delicate, handmade flowers to each of the forms. Typically, I work with high-fire porcelain paper clay …

Austin (22tu549): Mississippian Emergence In The Northern Yazoo Basin, Elizabeth Kay Hunt

Master's Theses

The Austin Site (22TU549) is a known transitional Late Woodland to early Mississippian village located in Tunica County, Mississippi. Compared with the cultural phases that have been developed in other regions the northern Yazoo Basin lacks a clearly defined “Emergent Mississippian” phase. This study examined the ceramic assemblage (n=30,567) from a 25% random sample of pit features to measure transitional change as a way to define an early Mississippian phase. It also explored the ways in which this site experiences the Mississippian transition and how it fits into the larger trajectory of the Mississippian phenomenon in the Southeastern United States …

Conduits, Jennifer Higerd

Master's Theses

Conduit refers to the means of conveying something vital from place to place or between beings. Clearly visible in some works, for which the connection plays a formal and symbolic role, the undisguised conduit shows the ways we connect to others. In its naked form, the conduit reveals the nature of our connections to others. At times fragile and tenuous, it can be tenaciously strong, sometimes so strong, perhaps too strong, that where the joint will not give way, the body itself will break. Made visible by the tubular form of the plant stem seen in cross -section, conduit cells …

Lovely Hungers, Brianne Fulton

Master's Theses

In Lovely Hungers I explore women's desires through the template of the decorative ceramic collectible. I emulate music boxes and princess figurines because they are targeted exclusively at the female consumer, and were the earliest version of commercial femininity to which I was exposed . I became infatuated with them swallowing their simplistic message hook, line, and sinker, only to be confronted with the complexities of my gender at a later age. Many women enjoyed the same items in childhood, and my hope is that the viewer relates to my tongue-in-cheek references to these endearing, yet saleable objects because of …