Art and Design Commons^™

I Buried The Fireworks Under The Tree, Sihan Zhu

Masters Theses

Unreachable memories always surround me. I've been trying to extract logical parts from my chaotic memories, hoping to find a connection with the world within the soundless, intangible black fireworks stored in my retina under the grand fireworks display. When I first encountered intaglio printmaking, I impulsively drew subconscious memories on the plate, arranging them along some chaotic storylines. Gradually, I realized that I needed to create my own logical structure. So I started using specific visual symbols and repeating them, using the repetition of the printmaking process to search for logical clues. Printmaking with its special rhythm allowed me …

Garden Etiquette, Kai Wasikowski

Masters Theses

Garden Etiquette is an ongoing project concerned with landscape photography, environmental conservation, and the way they have both served the settler colonialist agenda. I focus specifically on the conservation ideologies shaped in New South Wales (NSW) Australia and New England, United States of America (USA) in the late nineteenth century and the settler visualities that underwrote them. Both countries’ histories were marked by photography and conservation’s common function of mythologising land as empty space—to be invaded, extracted and occupied, and wilderness—to be territorialized and protected, albeit, in distinct ways.

With British, German and Polish settler ancestry, born and raised on …

Material Illumination, Lauren Mikaela Glenn

Masters Theses

Design exists as a field within the domain of material, accompanied by art, engineering, and craft. Working in material allows the designer to develop material fluency, a language that is composed of matter in space. Material can be used to communicate - it can also be used to think. By engaging the body and its senses in the act of making one can connect the space around the body to the space of the mind, allowing ideas to exist in objects and thinking to happen through interaction with material. Through the documentation of a process of making in wood, glass, …

Shalom, Zoe Schwartz

Masters Theses

I am a Jewish Filipina American, a hybrid of two hyper feminine archetypes: the Jewish American Princess and the Pinay Beauty Queen. Generations of assimilation, colonization and genocide taught my matriarchs to internalize the white male gaze. It was not until I looked in the mirror that I saw her. She understands the importance of performance and appearances because she knows, in a world that will not protect you, there is safety in conforming to feminine norms. She uses her knowledge of pop culture, beauty standards, humor, class symbols and social acceptability to imitate and perform desirable [white] femininity and …

Retelling A Landscape Through The Alchemy Of Recasting, Amanda Lee

Masters Theses

This project is an acknowledgment of reshaped landscapes while also understanding that this moment of time is only relevant to my own human lifespan and perspective. The work embodies unmet expectations when one confronts a memory landscape of their, or my, childhood. Specifically, I am discussing the chasm between reality and memory through a recent return to my childhood home in Colorado, and was met by two of the largest wildfires in the state’s history. This project takes a moment to digest that loss, of what was known, what was not, and can no longer be known: forests, trees, and …

Balancing The Tangible And Intangible, Shiqi Wu

Masters Theses

I love reading stories, but until now, I had never written my own. Balancing the Tangible & Intangible is organized around my experiences and stories, which are inseparable from my work. Together they constellate a narrative of remembrance. Memories surface, and so do connections, allowing for assurance and conviction during a time of personal flux and global unsettledness. As a choreographer and composer of relationships between the tangible and intangible, I rebuild networks of connections linking memories of my relationship to China, my home country, to my experience of living in the West.

In today's global society, population migration is …

Unfold The Body, Fan Su

Masters Theses

I was born into a physical body of flesh and bone, so I thought that I was one with it. As a carrier of my mind and soul, I believed that it was singular to me; that I had full ownership of it. So, why was I refusing womanhood? Was this devaluation of women a legacy? Was this a legacy unique to Chinese women?

As a woman born and raised in a metropolitan center in China, I proceeded through childhood and adolescence questioning my power as a woman. Feminine maturity and the societal pressure to follow the expectation of being …

An Invitation, Ashley Harris

Masters Theses

I am currently navigating between the concepts of body, material, space, and surface. I’m exploring ways to document and understand the full extent of my physical body in relation to the boundary and extent of my personal space. Each of my works displays strategies to understand my body and personal space. My intention is to confidently advocate for myself, particularly when my presence is questioned. At a time in which my body and presence are inherently political, I’m finding an urgency in how I articulate what my body is, the spaces my body navigates, and the surfaces to which my …

All Bodies Wander, Haley Mackeil

Masters Theses

This thesis describes how aspects of the environment can evoke the presence of a living organism. It discusses several projects by Haley MacKeil that are based on research within the natural world that includes documentation of sites, processes, installations, and artifacts made through video, glass, and papermaking. MacKeil’s practice forms a threshold between two worlds, two bodies, two different understandings—it creates sites for connections with something, someone, or a place that cannot be directly accessed.

Distilling The Narragansett Bay, Parker Ives

Masters Theses

My thesis is an investigation of material vernacular and a celebration of process and material. I am manipulating locally sourced materials to pull out unexpected qualities in order to distill a unique identity associated with a place and the things that give that place its character.

The resulting work focuses on distilling the Narragansett Bay through the lens of three categories. Reminiscence, Impression, Composition. These works fall into the categories of being reminiscent of a place, impressed upon by a place and composed of a place.

This thesis is not a conclusion of this area of inquiry, rather it seeks …

Storytelling In Arts, Lindi Shi

Masters Theses

People and narratives are the core of my art practice. Compared with only exploring the subject matter, I am more excited about the characters and narratives around it. My media gradually shifts from flat drawings or prints to installation, performance, and even explosions. Perhaps as a human myself, I like people a lot. There are always interesting stories where people go. The thesis discusses four stories, including an oral tale from my grandma, my personal experience, stories about bodies, and a story in the imagination. This writing reflects my research on the relationship between types of storytelling and various art …

The Things Of Mind, Yini Luo

Masters Theses

My thesis research shows my thinking and reflection on environmental changes around me in the past and especially the past two years. Through the experience between the city and nature, my research has clarified my different perspectives and explored the expression and reproduction through the print media and glass media.

Cross Your Fingers, Ayumi Kodama

Masters Theses

My work is warm, flavorless and light. Warm in the colors I use and the materials I choose. It is also the feeling of being at home or somewhere familiar. Flavorless because it is honest, humble and respectful of the material and its transformation it goes through into its final form. As a designer, I am the advocate for the material and its possibilities. I listen with my hands and let the material guide me. Light in its weight literally but in hue too. It is open, natural and subtle. My work has many layers, packed with many memories and …

Journey Through The Wasteland, Songlin Li

Masters Theses

I started planning this book at the end of last year, because I had to write it for my thesis, and also because I saw this as an opportunity to create, like making artwork. But the difference is that this does not look like my usual art, being only a book comprised of words and images.

From the end of last year to the beginning of this year, I experienced a terrible spiritual disillusionment and was caught in a cycle of depression and anxiety. Even though I was prepared to write this book last fall, I only really started in …

Multiple And Moving, Maia Chao

Masters Theses

This document maps my negotiation of the art practice as experienced in school. It is a record of development, evaluation, narration, articulation, reflection, argumentation, and continual redefinition. I consider the physical and social realities of the studio practice as they relate to my needs, values, and desires on a personal and global scale. Flitting between the mundane and the fundamental, the center and the margins, this thesis reflects my mental topography as a series of parts whose relations to each other are multiple and moving.

How Long Can You Hold Your Breath?, Felicia Leroy

Masters Theses

I began freediving, a sport in which one dives as deep as possible on single breath hold, as a way to approach the inaccessible space of the deep, to expand my understanding of the unobtainable.

This space (the deep) seemed to me to be representative of something that is totally unknown, its power existing in its inaccessibility, in its un-know-ability.

Through training/experiential data collection and using human physiology at depth as a framework, this thesis work book explores a single breath hold to the other side.

Work made in support of this exploration touches on darkness, depth, the edge, the …