Art and Design Commons^™

A Body Finding Freedom Within Itself, Malda Smadi

Masters Theses

When a dislocation of any type occurs, whether geographical, emotional, or spiritual, the disorder pushes the self to retreat to safety. For me, that safety is in my body. It is in this place of retreat where I locate my original home.

In this space of translocation, I forage for materials from my surroundings and places that I belong to. Moving between Dubai, Damascus, Beirut, and Providence, I shape a reality dependent on what is available. I then transform these materials, searching for the forms and relationships that emerge while meditating on home and the body as a moving vessel …

Bloody Show, Leonie Weber

Theses and Dissertations

Leonie Weber reflects on how reproductive, domestic, and emotional labor is addressed in her artwork, and her experience as an artist-parent in the art world. Moreover, she specifically discusses mothers who are navigating their own artistic paths. Her practice encompasses sculpture, printmaking, performance, and installation.

Kiss/Caress, Laurie Green

Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture

Like many aspects of self, my sexuality remained under wraps for the first three decades of my life. I felt desexualised in my body, unaware of my autism but deeply aware of my alienation and social position. Unable to find a sexual reflection in popular culture and bombarded with tropes of toxic masculinity I turned my sexual desires inwards. Only with my closest confidant, my partner, did any semblance of sexuality emerge, mediated by images and symbols imbibed as a teenager. My deep desire for connection that extended into sexuality felt ossified and unaired—kept in an air-sealed wrapper, like a …

Water Bearer, Whitney Harris

Theses and Dissertations

My work explores fantasy and mythological archetypes. The exhibition features works on paper depicting mermaids, and a fountain featuring two figures submerged in water, one spitting into the other's mouth. I use black ink and glazes to create variegated surfaces. In these works, I reimagine ideas about power and intimacy.

Play Among The Shadows, Xiong Wei

Theses and Dissertations

This article elaborates Xiong Wei's inspiration and experience from different cultural, political, social systems and art environment as a Chinese artist living in the United States, and the logic and methodology of how he went from a social realist sculptor to a contemporary artist.

A Wound, A Residue, Nicole Dolores Schemansky

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College

The Body Extended, Yi Yang

Masters Theses

The book isn’t meant to have a center. The book is not meant to be read in order.

A book is made up of different dates and different speeds.

The chapters of the book delve nonlinearly into a range of philosophic, scientific, and political subjects connected by threads of ideas that go off in different directions at different speeds and different intensities.

Accompanying my research, memories, and project documentation, I record personal anecdotes that reflect my passion and my obsessions, as well as lay the foundation for the included work.

The book is a map book, a roots book, an …

Water Gets Lost In The Sea, Sun Gets Lost In The Desert, Rocio Paz Guerrero

Theses and Dissertations

The absence of happiness, the absence of nature, the absence of justice, the absence of absence, which is presence. My desire is to make these voids visible and sensible by connecting to and with others, from our intimate and collective life experiences, with empathy, and by sharing. Through a hybrid of sculpture, installation, and performance, I move within this tense in-between space, asking myself about that void, if it is possible for it to be filled, or if it is perhaps too big, or if it is perhaps too late.

Phantasmatic: Interrogating The (Im)Materiality Of Bodies Through Wool And Clay, Alexandria J. Arceneaux

LSU Master's Theses

Phantasmaticis an exploration of materials and materiality which relies on the concept of the phantasmatic body elucidated in Gayle Salamon’s work Assuming a Body: Transgender and Rhetorics of Materiality. This thesis is an exploration of these ideas. In my work, I use wool and clay to represent the material (known) and phantasmatic (sensed) bodies in an effort to explore an expanded understanding of the body at large. My work is also an effort to expand my own understanding of my phantasmatic body and its relationship to (my) materiality.

Between And Beyond, Noah F. Heil

Art and Art History Honors Projects

Between and Beyond is a series of handbuilt and wheel-thrown ceramic objects which explore intimate queer relationships through the human figure. I assemble slabs of clay to create openings and negative spaces within the sculptures, implying the ways in which the human form also acts as a vessel. The sculptures as well as the figures themselves remain open and vulnerable, literally and metaphorically. The body is depicted through fragmented sections, alluding to the ways in which society and culture break up gender and sexuality into limiting binaries. These intimate, private moments are meant to conjure an imagined future free of …

Constraint And Control, Patricia Ayres

Theses and Dissertations

I have long considered themes of the body. Drawing on my knowledge as a fashion designer, I bring materials and hardware from the fashion industry into my artwork transforming and rendering them non-functional. My sculptures relate to stories of isolation, separation, and confinement. The following pages will analyze how the United States penal system controls, constrains and restricts the body through physical and psychological wounds. Furthermore, they will examine how the Catholic Church controls people’s minds and behavior through a ritualistic belief system.

The Alchemical Vessel, River Soma

MFA Statements

My work comes from a place of deep feeling on a bodily level. Amidst the decorative play, there is a sense of the primitive and primordial, and also a certain humanity and clumsiness through struggle. Through the hermetic tradition I relate the alchemical vessel and its symbolic process of interior development to my artistic practice. Focusing in mixed media sculpture, I discovered a concentrated accumulation of symbolism specific to my practice, but also the full recognition of my practice as a ritualized psychological undertaking.

Converging Objects Of The Universe, Everett Hoffman

Theses and Dissertations

Reconfigured found objects shape scenes of everyday life, questioning the structural histories that go into defining an identity. Engaging in a multidisciplinary approach of making, my work reimagines the function of ornamentation and its relationship to the body. I approach new materials and found objects with the eye of a jeweler, highlighting and exploiting the subtle, and often invisible, links between material histories and their connection to identity. Material debris patinated with age like skillets, baseballs, and furniture are used to penetrate normative structures around identity, gender, and sexual desire. Using adornment as a support in my installations I propose …

It Takes A Long Time To Move, Issy Marie Cassou

Senior Projects Spring 2017

A doorway.

A grave.

A body.

A scar.

The hole was dug in my studio a month after I had moved in and the day after I burned my foot in the metal shop. A new navel sits on the top of my left foot and a raised scar marks an accidental grave in the ground of studio ten in Red Hook, New York. It came from water. A leaking pipe. Blueprints of the building did not point here as the source of the water main because there are no blueprints. Instead, a pipe in the corner and a shot …

Sawft.Servindat... [V1.7], Ray Ferreira

Theses and Dissertations

A descriptor of my artistic practice, a text piece, a series of linguistic musings, and more, Sawft.servindat… [v1.7] attempts to explore the dance between language, embodiment, and performativity. More specifically, the text moves through metaphor and metonym, Englishes, Spanishes, and Images, the performativity of representation and the representation of performativity —my body. My body moving across spaces and times. As part of the Sawft.servindat… series, Sawft.servindat… [v1.7] uses the scroll down format of most PDF reading software to activate the inherently embodied experience of intra-acting with technologies, resisting the dichotomy between the virtual and analog. Englishes juxtaposed with Spanishes juxtaposed …

With Every Fiber, Catherine Megan Calloway

Senior Projects Spring 2016

Displaying and covering the human form, fiber inherently refers to the body. It wraps, protects, and conveys stories about us. This accumulation of work uses strands of fiber to define space, create structures, and manipulate the human form. Considering the process of craft in which bodies manipulate fiber, this work explores the way in which fiber manipulates bodies. As sculptures that envelope a human form, each garment mandates how a body may move both within and outside of it, engendering a performance in which both entities assert limits and capabilities. Each knot, stitch, and weave, is an expression of time, …