Art and Design Commons^™

Inner Portraits, Bethany Salisbury

Graduate Theses

This paper investigates the many interconnected layers of women’s mental health through portraiture and how animal and plant symbolism can represent the way women's hormones and bodily health affect their mental health. I reveal how the artwork created presents these connections and inner mental health narratives to the viewer, creating a space of empathy, destigmatization, and self-reflection. This body of portraiture art connects five women through a series of both two-and three-dimensional portraits based on interviews using my own adaptation of Sara Lawrence-Lightfoots’ (1983) portrait methodology.

Women and non-binary individuals have always dealt with difficult interactions of bodily and mental …

Fragmentation Of Thought, Thomas Seay

Graduate Theses

This thesis statement expounds on my thesis exhibition, a series of four sculptures that explore the contemporary expanding field of sculpture through the fusion of non-traditional or unmonumental materials with portrait painting and collage techniques. The works are built on questions of form, and references historical art movements: Renaissance and Baroque, Cubism, and Post- Modernism. The first is present in the classical portraiture I include in the pieces; the second, in the fragmented style; the third, in the multiple narrative voices of viewers, in the use of non-traditional or unmonumental materials, and in the unexpected groupings of objects, both made …