Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Every Force Evolves A Form, Nicholas Fusaro

Theses and Dissertations

Every Force Evolves A Form is a process-orientated, sculptural body of work that incorporates Shaker-inspired design as an all-encompassing system of display. Historical and contemporary methods of production are merged with the personal, the American past, and folklore, emphasizing scale, movement, play, and iteration.

Between The Garden And The Gardener, Sara Lynne Lindsay

Theses and Dissertations

My work uses plant material and soil as a record of personal, cultural, and ecological history. History is not only held in the buildings and monuments, but in the soil itself. I gather this soil and foliage from both cultivated and uncultivated locations for my artwork. Using traditional domestic techniques of drying and canning, I preserve the materials that I have gathered. These will then be sewn together, cooked, and encrusted into objects. Despite my labor of preserving, these organic art supplies are transient. When made into works of art, they can be viewed in their vulnerable state, fighting against …

A Parar Para Avanzar: To Stop/To Stand/To Strike To Advance, Christina N. Barrera

Theses and Dissertations

This paper presents the first fragments of a political framework outlining how I situate my work, which lives between “craft” and “art” models of making and between colonized and colonizing traditions. My writing proposes ways of making and being informed by practices, strategies, and organizing that work towards greater autonomy and liberation under these conditions.

Dregs / Lessons From The Things Around Us, Juan-Manuel Pinzon

Theses and Dissertations

The writing in Lessons From the Things Around Us is in support of the work in my MFA thesis show, dregs. I detail the progression of my making and thinking over the last two years. I expand on the material and personal relationships that have manifested themselves in the work and influenced my approach to the things that surround me. Finally, I point to a more expansive definition of Craft, rooted in its material sensibilities, and the possibilities already present in the field that this definition creates.

Until Its Calmness Can Claim You, Gabrielle Mchugh

Theses and Dissertations

This is an invitation to pause //

This is an externalization of my inner landscape, a highlight of what I value in my everyday and what comprises my lexicon of a sacred space. The following is a journey of nets, quiet, the sacred, space, and the in-between; where I share research and questions that are the foundation for my thesis work, Until Its calmness can claim you.

// This is an invitation to find moments of quiet in the noise

Defiantly Childlike: Using Aesthetic Resistance To Heal, Sarah K. Reagan

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis examines an alternative processing mechanism surrounding the act of healing after traumatic experiences in life. Using a methodology of iterative patterning and tool-pathing, a collection of inflatable garments and wooden mannequins analyzes defense mechanisms learned in early childhood development. This work highlights an essential body of recent scholarship that takes cuteification seriously to restore a childlike approach to mastering fear. This paper will review the definitions of cuteness and childlike humor and then describe how visual culture has implemented these components to subvert established power.

Beyond The Threshold, Kathleen Granados

Theses and Dissertations

Crossing through spaces of memory, generational dialogues, and the domestic psyche, Beyond the Threshold investigates the precarious nature of home. Spanning installation, sculpture, and sound, these explorations underscore patterns and materializations of the ever-present past.

Port To World, Samuel M. Brown

Theses and Dissertations

Among those that are ill for long periods, there is often a mistrust created not only in one’s own body but in the institution that promises a cure to the malady. Often this stems naturally from the dogma of the institution paired with one’s desire for wellness, for the institution's goals are many besides the overall health of the patient. Even when a patient is cured of an ailment, this is often just the first step in the actual healing process. The body can quickly change, and the mind takes time to catch up with the body's condition. My 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.

After The Big Wind Stops I See Gentle Waves, Eunji (Jubee) Lee

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis covers my reflections on the inspirations and the motivations behind selected works including my candidacy exhibition; Resonance and my thesis exhibition; after the big wind stops I see gentle waves. It contains my life throughout my MFA studies and the development of my art practice. Through its story-within-a-story method of narration and my describing streams of my thoughts, I am attempting to explain the processes of my development and the discoveries I have made, the little things in my daily life, and the big turning points that inspired me. My work and this document have been strongly determined …

Through My Window, Haiyin Liang

Theses and Dissertations

I convey my thoughts through art jewelry; making jewelry is my language of communication and commemoration. Inspired by historical Chinese art and contemporary jewelry, my practice pays attention to bring classical Chinese aesthetics of hazy poetic and ideal arrangement into the contemporary jewelry field. The attention to detail refers to the quiet contemplation and emotional experiences encouraged by each of my works. Through my research, I use metalsmithing language to communicate with non-precious materials finding my own way of expression and meditation. Meanwhile, I build environments that display jewelry off the body in order to construct a picturesque landscape. The …

Lessons, Kathryn K. Murphy

Theses and Dissertations

I am learning through these lessons.

The following document includes my convoluted musings about my work, making process, and body leading up to my thesis exhibition, Avoidance Kitchen. My struggle with my reflected image comes from my struggle with my self-perceived physical image.

What does it mean for a piece to disappear, only to find the reflection of someone else's work or body in its place? Is my craft rendered obsolete if all you want to do is take a funny selfie? Is my work unacknowledged if all you see is the sculpture across the room, in reverse? What happens …

Re-Exploring My Identity As A Japanese Woman, Fumi Amano

Theses and Dissertations

This document contains reflections on my motivations and the personal decisions made in the realization of selected works leading up to and including my thesis exhibition "Voice". The following text shares the many and varied connections between my life and art-making. My issues in my personal relationships with others has spilled out from my heart and turned into these works. I'm continuously expressing the unsuccessful attempts we make at developing true bonds that bridge the gaps between people.

Collective Cadence, Alicia Dietz

Theses and Dissertations

Collective Cadence

Stories that start at birth,

end with death,

and include everything in-between.

A Medal of Honor recipient,

A mistake.

Morning coffee;

a late night call.

Whispered first names;

an off-key chorus;

deafening explosions;

silence.

One child playing;

another lifeless.

On the battlefield,

concealment is a survival skill.

Off that battlefield,

transparency enables survival.

Stories that shape the fabric of our experience

The threads that bind us

Through the telling of each,

we are united as one.

In the telling of the collective,

We find our own.

These are our stories.

This is our story.

So Much Apparent Nothing, Emily Mcbride

Theses and Dissertations

This document contains reflections on motivations behind selected works leading up to and including my thesis exhibition so much apparent nothing. Through journal excerpts and analysis of my own psychology, I attempt to put into words my thoughts concurrent to my making, indirect as they may be. The following text shares my personal conflicts and ideologies surrounding art-making, the permanence of objects, and the acceptance of an identity in flux.

Lullaby, Amber M. Smith

Theses and Dissertations

I have been investigating the way in which my mind has altered my memories, especially from childhood. The more a moment is recalled, the less precise it becomes. The most inaccurate memories from childhood are the ones I have fixated on. Bedrooms are spaces where dreaming, sleeping and reverie take place leading to even more fragmenting. The intimate space of a bedroom allows me to represent the personal distorted recollections. The bedroom furniture is missing parts, shifted in height and placement or combined together. By making doubles of furniture, a direct comparison can be made from the real piece to …

Artificial Dissemination, Brian Fleetwood

Theses and Dissertations

This writing is an experiment in combining the two most important frameworks through which I understand the world, the storytelling traditions of my people, the Mvskoke(Creek), and the rational tradition that began with European Enlightenment era thinking. By weaving allegorical narrative (much of it personal) into theoretical speculation, I draw connections between recollection, truth, and the act of making. This examination of the gaps and connections between seemingly disparate worldviews, runs in parallel to the purpose of my work, wherein I construct fictive symbiotic and parasitic relationships between jewelry and wearer. This work takes advantage of the wearer as environment, …

Hissār, Sohail Abdullah

Theses and Dissertations

Hissaar is a noun and a verb, it is the periphery and the extremities, and the walls and the fortress. And it is to encircle, to wrap and to contain. This paper is an inexhaustive account of thoughts, experiences and lessons learned, of varying forms that influence my aesthetic sensibilities, my art-value system, and my art- ethical concerns. They provide for my art the impetus for its perpetual (and perhaps circular) journey. It is about finding connections between the fraying ends of free floating ideas. The following fragments explores how words make ideas, ideas make images, images make memory; memory …

A Voice From The Dust, Gian Pierotti

Theses and Dissertations

We shall not starve. We shall not lack shelter. We shall have a hearth. Awake self reliance! Our art is for feeding, warmth, protection. Ceramics– our temporal salvation. Clay– our material life-force. Transformed by fire we arise with the skills of the ancients! No longer will we live in obscurity. To the deskilled, your fate is at hand! You have chosen alienation, distraction, banality, and sloth. Embrace your digital false Gods and die or be reborn to the natural physical world. Now, together we complete our reason for being. We create a new world of kinship. A hope for the …

A Subversive Socialist Craftsperson In The Post-Post Modern World (The Conspiratorial Ranting Of Kristoff Kamrath), Kristoffer Kamrath

Theses and Dissertations

My research in this thesis delves into the corruption of American culture and my personal experience with the academic institution of art school. I delineate my symbolic representation of a social agenda through images and objects that reference the absurdity of institutionalized art and the decay of socialist idealism in the realm of crafts and contemporary culture at large.

Outside Things, Jacob Sorenson

Theses and Dissertations

My thesis is a description of the issues encountered during the process of research and construction of the objects leading to, and consisting of, the work shown in Outside Things. The work is my attempt to gain personal insight into the complicated relationship between nature and culture. Through abstract furniture objects, floral patterns, and robots I explore the relationship between actual landscape and the constructed man-made bio-mimicry that convolutes the definition of Nature.

Craft Cyborg, Laina Seay

Theses and Dissertations

By merging the ancient associations that clay has with the human form and prosthetic science I question the relevancy and role of the human body in the future. As prosthetics heighten the awareness of the body through absence these additive limbs further this relevancy by presence. With greater advances in genetic engineering and plastic surgery biology will no longer dominate and these ridged clay extensions could become flesh.

Duality And The Parallel Lives, Hiromi Takizawa

Theses and Dissertations

My engagement with making is a metaphor that contains the interior landscapes of my mind. I continue to explore it by comparing and contrasting exterior and interior, investigating surface and depth, covering and exposing, and taking apart and putting together. I work to translate my individual experiences and emotions into a tangible form. The visual dialogues that I engage in with my work explore a range of aspects that are inherent and specific to my Japanese cultural heritage. It often springs from my daily encounters with the subtle nuances and observable oddities of living in the “West”. These experiences have …

Constructs: Truth, Lies, And Humanity, Nathan Hansen

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a discussion of my ideas, struggles and outcomes experienced during the making of my two bodies of work, Devices and Relics. These two bodies of work explore fleeting moments, the intrinsic values of labor and imagination with reference to sedentary living and labor in contemporary American society.

Mind, Body, And Handwoven Cloth, Andrea Donnelly

Theses and Dissertations

My work explores the nature of individual perception, and the side of our lives lived entirely within our minds. I do this through the lens of self-reflection, examining the images of my own mental life and translating them into delicately handwoven cloth. These images and their structures become sensory experiences of the intangible, and a meeting place for my internal life and that of my viewer. The cloth I weave is simultaneously familiar and strange. Through woven surface and imbedded imagery, I attempt to illuminate the deep emotions that necessarily isolate us from each other, and the shared experiences of …

Schema, Ann Walsh

Theses and Dissertations

A schema is described as a diagram showing the basic outline of something, or as an organizational or conceptual pattern in the mind. It is also, in Kantian philosophy, a method that allows the understanding to apply concepts to the evidence of the senses. My Schema is a model of emergence.