Art and Design Commons^™

A Community Of Knots, Katherine Mahler

MFA in Visual Arts Theses

In her 1965 essay On Weaving, the artist Anni Albers stated, “As it is possible to go from any place to any other, so also, starting from a defined and specialized field, can one arrive at a realization of ever-extending relationships. Thus tangential subjects come into view. The thoughts, however, can, I believe, be traced back to the event of a thread” (Albers XI). A thread is the beginning of coming into being. In this paper, I will discuss the lines of my work from the beginning of the program, exploring mapping to how my work as a teacher …

Sanctuary, Harsha Kejriwal

Masters Theses

When I first arrived in New England, I was accustomed to thinking of winters as short but pleasant periods. For me, winter was a break from the strong and relentless sunlight of summer in Central India. But the contrast between my childhood winters and the same months in the Northeastern United States was dramatic. Statistically, Providence has an average of five hours of sunlight a day whereas Central India enjoys 9.5 hours during its coldest months. This pronounced change in light piqued my interest. I was struck by the various phenomena created by natural light during these cold months. Sunlight, …

Heretic Territories: Spells For Fracture, Mia Greenwald

Masters Theses, 2020-current

This monograph accompanies the MFA thesis exhibition, Heretic Territories: spells for fracture. The show uses video, weaving, clay, and bacterial/fungal bodies in three main bodies of work: Inter; Lost, remain, fracture; and For, Of Them. The pieces, and the relationship between them, explore themes of magic, the body, and land in contradiction and opposition to colonial and capitalist structures. I approach the artificial hierarchies that subjugate people, non-human creatures, and land while trying not to replicate the mistakes of posthumanist scholarship that bypasses the fact that not all people are afforded full access to the category …

World Settings, Elizabeth Meiklejohn

Masters Theses

Acoustical building materials, with their ability to absorb and diffuse sound, can reshape the character of interior spaces in profound ways. Woven textiles often perform as acoustical materials, whether by coincidence or by design; strategic use of textile structure and dimensionality can yield specific experiential qualities in homes, offices and shared spaces. The way certain materials manipulate sound can feel otherworldly, as if they break the laws of physics or the familiar parameters of one’s surroundings. The same properties can be found in emergent visual patterns and illusory lighting conditions, which provoke an investigative, deliberate way of looking.

In this …

Woven Words In The Iliad: Gender, Narrative, And Textile Production In The Scholia Of The Venetus A Manuscript, Anne-Catherine Schaaf

College Honors Program

The work of previous scholars has established powerful connections between the process of creating textiles and process of epic oral composition. I build on disparte sources from the fields of archaeology and philology and analyze how the scholia in one epic manuscript of the Iliad, the Venetus A, treat this issue and with a focus on how it interplays with gender, specifically the female characters in the Iliad who produce textiles. I focus on a few major sections of scholia and important scenes of weaving in the Iliad. The key female characters in the novel, both divine and human nearly …

Textile Architecture, Zoe Yates

Masters Theses

The escalating climate crisis has exposed many cracks in conventional building systems. Modern architectural processes contribute to climate change by consuming high levels of energy throughout the building cycle—from sourcing materials to construction to energy use once buildings are in use. Conventional architecture’s emphasis on heaviness and permanence makes these problems unavoidable. Light, temporary architecture is a solution to both the environmental impacts of the practice (the cause) and to the challenges of living in ever more impermanent situations (the effect). As climate change continues to manifest in rising global temperatures, sea level rise, drought, unpredictable weather, and natural disasters, …

Dal And Rice, Anushka Divecha

Masters Theses

I have always been a nostalgic person. I have boxes of old photographs, letters, birthday cards and objects from significant days in my life. I have confetti from different concerts, friendship bracelets and old diaries. While typically not represented by keepsakes, memories of food are some of my strongest. They encompass all five senses, which is perhaps why they are so powerful. Every time I smell a spice or taste something familiar, I am instantly transported to a certain place and time.

As a textile artist, I use materials, textures, imagery, and senses to evoke place and time. This year …

Insecurities: Tracing Displacement And Migration, Hammad Abid

Masters Theses

“Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Migration,” the title of both my thesis work and thesis book, calls attention to displacement and forced migration as a disruption in the continuity of place, relationships, identity, memory, and time. Through a collection of textiles, I try to capture the psychological, social, and physical effects of forced migration and communicate the impact of political violence on identity and coexistence.

In this book, I position myself within the context of how the current Indian government is attempting to rewrite the nation’s history and distort India’s pluralistic story. I tell a personal narrative of displacement in harrowing …

Mais Fica : More For Me, Gabrielle Marie Ferreira

Masters Theses

This book is as much a part of my thesis as the fabrics and patterns themselves, stitched together from moments and memories. You may take these stories with you, but those hidden moments between my words will always remain for me and me alone. No matter how many people take these stories with them, still mais fica.

Awe-Struck, Emily Robertson

Masters Theses

Awe-struck is an exploration at the intersection of embodied and situated cognition, sight, sense-making and nature with an additional layer of artistic interpretation and emotional response. Adapting elements of Terrapin Bright Green’s biophilic design principles, this work pushes past the well researched benefits of incorporating nature into a designed space, to uncover an individual’s personal connection to an environment. The connection is multi-faceted—layered with observations of space, color and location, filtered through a lense of physical, philosophical and psychological reactions and then translated into an individual personal history. With a specific focus on wild spaces, where humans have designed and …

Haptic Wonder : The Sensation Of Exquisite Craft, Anjuli Berstein

Masters Theses

I reinterpret traditional woven techniques to create permeable handcrafted screens, by using archival research of historical passementerie and gauze structures. Conceptually, these textiles are an exploration of how wonder can be reached through exquisite craft, a result of valuable raw materials combined with fine hand manipulation. I attempt to distinguish a kind of wonder that exists as a tactile sensation based on haptic sight of minutia, versus the sublime as an experience of optical sight of distant objects.

Mind In Hand, Anna Olson

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

This thesis explores the intersection of art and psychology as it manifests in my art practice, particularly in the medium of weaving. The contemporary frameworks of memory and archive provide the basis of this discussion, as well as findings from the field of Art Therapy. Difficult emotions like loss and grief often show up in my work, and I will discuss how artists like Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Sophie Calle also utilize these concepts. In weaving, I capture my internal mental states, memories, and perceptions of the future in a variety of found and gifted objects. Guided by the precedents set …

129 Home Ave., Ella Whittemore Hill

Senior Projects Spring 2018

Walking through my childhood home late at night, half asleep with my eyes barely open, I was always able to navigate myself around every corner, down every hallway, and past every creak in the floor. The muscle memory of this house, which I left behind long ago, continues to live within my body. Memory becomes faint over time; it changes and evolves, but it never disappears. Rather, it matures from the physical specificity of being in a house to being the stories of that house. When my mother moved out a few years ago (a move which I was unable …

Will You Accept This Rose?, Sasha Baskin

Theses and Dissertations

Using figures from the popular culture program The Bachelor in a large-scale tapestry-style weaving, I address the drive to create idealized simulations in order to better understand one’s own reality and identity. Natural dye and traditional weaving processes in combination with digital weaving technology allow me to literally integrate the juxtaposition of analog and digital elements which defines a woven image.

Dye work and pattern allow for large gestural drawing marks while individual threads overlap to create literal pixelized imagery. I examine the act of weaving as the creation of screens through which one can see, hide, or obscure. I …

How To Become Ocean?, Elaina Runge

Masters Theses

A shifting viewpoint transforms into multiple perspectives to explore surface and depth.

By compressing time into an instant, or expanding a moment out in infinite directions, patterns reveal and obscure themselves.

A process that is both rational and intuitive emerges through the use of different systems to approach the unknown.

The ocean operates as a metaphor. The beyond guides the search of one who is tethered to the shore.

Plastic, linen, silk, elastic, glass, cellulose, protein: fold, curve, bend, distort, resist to create forms that are neither unfamiliar nor named.

Blue, blue-grey, blue-green, blue violet, azure, cobalt, sapphire, lapis lazuli, …

Weaving In The Third-Dimension, Jill Gottschalk

Graduate Theses

This thesis statement, along with my final exhibition of sculpture, is the culmination of my graduate studies at Winthrop University. My reflections upon my sculpture, as well as connections to other artists within the art-historical canon, have provided me with a foundation which will remain fast in the years ahead. Throughout my studies, my work has evolved and changed, yet commonalities remain. It is these commonalities, aspects of my own style that remain constant, that are explored: ambiguity, transparency, use of textile materials and repetitive units. My recent body of work, and the subject of my thesis Weaving in the …

The Handweavers Of Modern-Day Southern Appalachia: An Ethnographic Case Study, Cathryn F. Washell

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

One of the most prominent traditions associated with the Southern Appalachians is the art of weaving. Extensive research has focused on the history of Appalachian weaving, but there is little on the current weaving community. Today, the region still serves as an axis for weaving, and many practicing weavers, weaving instructors, and learning institutions can be found in Southern Appalachia. The core of this study is the interviews with ten weavers that reside and practice their work in Appalachia. Using concept coding, the transcripts of the interviews led to the development of four major themes that highlight the weavers’ discovery …

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, …

Utilization Of The Frame Loom For Weaving In The Secondary School, Bonnie Jean Powell

All Master's Theses

Creating weavings on the frame loom is an important method to be investigated in that it is possible to create complex and creative forms without using the intricate process of the harness loom. Because frame loom weaving has so many advantages for secondary art students, it should be investigated and explained so that future teachers, who have had little or no experience with it, could see its value and teach it to their own students.