Art and Design Commons^™

Ripe Spoils, Yan Cynthia Chen

Theses and Dissertations

Chen’s practice primarily focus on sculptures and installation. She explores the interplay between the idea of nature and the constructed environment, by examining how language informs what we know. The central thesis, "Ripe Spoils", employs citrus fruits as symbols for bodily experiences and personal identity, investigating their cultural and historical significance. Her sculptures summon the qualities and embedded meanings in materials like paper pulp and clay, wax and citrus fruits, often resulting in abstracted forms evocative of the human body. This thesis paper and exhibition reflect on themes like mortality and the essence of self.

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Through The Kaleidoscope, Andrea Simpson

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

Andrea Simpson, a California-based artist with a BA and MA from the California State University of San Bernardino, draws inspiration from the transformative power of psychedelics. Her artistic style merges vibrant colors, rhythmic patterns, and abstract forms, showcased across diverse mediums including ceramics, glass, and painting. Simpson's dynamic and experimental approach to art invites viewers on a mesmerizing journey that merges music, psychedelia, and contemporary art, providing a unique and immersive encounter.

Warmth Of The Sun, Drake M. Gerber

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Warmth of the Sun, is a reflection on personal experiences I’ve had in the landscape while living in the Northwest. This curated experience is an attempt to capture my sincerity towards a place and hold onto that feeling. I intend to share faded memories of personal experiences through enigmatic sculptures to make the viewer look a bit closer at these objects and see the landscape in a new way. This paper explores thoughts on the idea of place, material, process, contemporary influences, and the experiences that inspired this body of work.

A Fragile [In] Tension, Jose Homero Gutierrez, Jose Homero Gutierrez

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The exhibition, a FRAGILE [In] TENSION, is a compilation of 6 sculptural installation works—the result of two and a half years of work in the ceramics workshop— combining various ceramic procedures, incorporating crochet techniques, and repurposed materials. Each of the materials represents specific memories of the past linked to a place of origin and people deeply attached to me, representing complementary feelings. Ceramic objects were created on the potter's wheel and subsequently joined, modified, intervened, and added to their corresponding installations following a series of self-directed design rules. The sculptures are an emotional, psychological, and physical response to the past …

Nepantla: The Space In-Between, Samantha Shamard

All Theses

The word Nepantla is from the Mesoamerican Nahuatl language and is used by theorist Gloria Anzaldúa to describe a space of mixed, and borderland identity. Nepantla: the space in-between creates a physical manifestation of my experience as a mixed Latina woman raised in American suburban culture. This series is made up of ceramic objects on wall-mounted altars made of wood panels adorned with wallpaper and paint. The surfaces utilize visual references and color schemes from 90s girls’ bedrooms and Mexican pop-culture. Ceramic bones and cacti mounted onto the altar forms are all made through molded ceramic processes, which for me …

Mixed Messages, Hannah Duggan

Masters Theses

The bodies of work that I have created during graduate school stem from my interest in mass media, culture studies and spectatorship in the digital era. My research engages digital technology and media studies to consider the ethics and ambivalence associated with spectatorship. Using traditional art mediums, I explore social and digital media, revealing tensions through representation and materiality. This translation from digital to analogue media is pivotal in all my work. Handmade objects introduce slippage and meaning as they break from the limiting format of the screen. This thesis will explore the research and content that inspired the creation …

Brick Collage, Dehmie Dehmlow

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

bricolage: construction or creation from a diverse range of available things

I create abstracted modular sculptures, assemblages, and collages that playfully reference utility, using salvaged materials and carefully fabricated objects. My sculptures are considerately composed, elevating the materials with a determined focus on how each disparate part connects to the next to become a meaningful whole. I have a reverence for all of the objects and materials I use, no matter their origin, and thoroughly consider how each of their forms, textures, colors, weights and other formal and physical qualities integrate into a whole. With the use of recognizable utilitarian …

Echoes Of Home, Hanna Traynham

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The artist discusses her Master of Fine Arts exhibition, Echoes of Home, held at the Tipton Gallery in Johnson City, Tennessee on display March 15 through April 8, 2022. The author provides insight into concepts and influences relating to the creation of the exhibition with perspective on her intimate connection with place and memory.

The exhibit features five installations addressing home, elusive memory, and the change and continuity of cultural traditions over time. The works consist of a series of large-scale wild clay vessels, gestural clay bookends, a wall installation of cups with a line drawing, suspended porcelain slabs, …

It Won’T Be Easy, Allison Arkush

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

Interdisciplinary artist Allison Arkush engages a wide range of materials, modalities, and research in her practice. In It Won’t Be Easy, Arkush places and piles her multimedia sculptures throughout the gallery to create installations that overlap ­with her writing and poetry, sometimes layering in (or extending out to) audio and video components. This approach facilitates the probing exploration of prevailing value systems through a flattening of hierarchies among and between humans, the other-than-human, and the inanimate—though no less lively. Her work meditates on and ‘vendiagrams’ things forsaken and sacred, the traumatic and nostalgic. The exhibition title acknowledges that the …

Current(S), Austin Raye Navrkal

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Current(s) addresses my perspective of the subtle changes that happen as the seasons slowly transition to act as a metaphor for the subtle changes that have happened to me over the course of my time in graduate school.

Damned Ol' Dirt, Molly Morningglory

All Theses

damned ol’ dirt centers mindfulness and embodiment practices to foster relationships with the self, each other, and the land. These relationships intend to collectively imagine and then build an emotionally and environmentally sustainable and joyful future. My practice foregrounds clay with digital video, photography, and fabric dyeing, recording the imprint of performance. I use my hereditary understanding of clay and fibers, a trained attunement to the natural world, and my background of performance in craft (via demonstration of tactile techniques) to transfer knowledge and skill to the viewer. Through the creation of tableaus and documents of rituals based in materiality, …

Reclaim, Harris Benjamin Deno

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

I make ceramic and mixed media objects that embody interaction with material. Translated from the simple utterance of the hand the material articulates the labor. As in any relationship there are miscommunications and disagreements; Desperation, struggle, and honest interaction are apparent on the surface of the labored forms. Objects are created in an immediate fashion, the intimacy of the moment folded into the material. Each interaction an embodiment of the human experience. I think of these works as entries in a journal; The gravity of a moment is captured, relieving the mind by bearing that weight.

Whenever approaching a work, …

Lost In Translation, Amanda Barr

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

Lost in Translation addresses the issues that trauma can create in communication; whether that be a physical trauma that damages ability to speak, think, or understand language, or mental and emotional trauma that significantly effects abilities to process, connect, and manage interpersonal relationships. My work is my voice, and a way to help others connect, to feel heard, and to even help them begin to communicate.

Day Gone, Matthew D. Zorn

LSU Master's Theses

As an exploration of the natural world and the otherworldly, Day Gone seeks to define the relationships between disparate places. Through the use of ceramic and supporting materials, the objects serve as a portal to a terra incognita of color, texture, and language. The installation is a catalog of experiences and feelings I hold consciously or unconsciously.

An Open Bag, Matilde Benmayor

Theses and Dissertations

What do we take with us? How much space should we leave in the bag for what we might find? This paper is a journey from under the rug and onto the pavement. Sowing spiderweb maps I try to make a new city my own.

I Think You Were In My Dream Last Night, Josie Cotton

Senior Projects Spring 2020

I Think You Were In My Dream Last Night

I have always worked by creating opportunities for mistakes and then fixing them. I’ve taken inspiration from the things I pick up every day: cups, necklaces, coat hangers, tables, chairs. I’ve taken inspiration from my dreams. They are always based in reality but twisted into a shape I’ve never seen before, and I wonder where these ideas come from. When I wake up, the people or the places I dreamt about are changed forever by a new perspective, out of my control. That is an idea I wanted to sift through …

Resilience, Resistance And Revival In 20th-Century Yoruba Art, Charles Mason, Andie Near

Kruizenga Art Museum Exhibition Catalogs

Kruizenga Art Museum, Hope College Catalog for exhibition: “Resilience, Resistance and Revival in 20th-Century Yoruba Art”. Exhibition dates: January 17—May 16, 2020. Charles Mason, author; Andie Near, photographer, designer; Lisa Barney, editor; Cecilia O’Brien ‘21, typographer.

Accumulation, Erin Mccarty

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

This written Thesis is the supporting documentation for Accumulation, a Master of Fine Arts Thesis Exhibition at West Virginia University. This exhibition creates an environment in which a viewer can enter. This installation environment is created based on formal elements combined with fantastical elements from the imagination of the artist. The formal choices in the work provoke a positive otherworldly and whimsical response in the viewer. The environment is designed to provide relief from problems in the everyday world through patterns, forms, colors and surfaces. These elements are harvested from the natural world and recombined in a fantastical way. …

Seeing Through Feeling, Christopher Mitchell Rodgers

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

The purpose of this paper is to describe both the inherent formal qualities and conceptual framework that are addressed within the exhibition, Seeing Through Feeling. The exhibition is centered around the methodology of making, collection, and display all through the one singular positioning, the object. The objects within the exhibition are either handmade or collected fragments that weave together around the singular position of craft and history under the pretense of how our understanding of time may not always be true. The thesis breaks down key components through specific themes into the categories of the hand, eye, symbol, object, value, …

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 …

This Is Just To Say, Iren Tete

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

My memories are marked by the desire to evade logic. At a young age I became a proficient player of the “What If” game.

What if I could hold light in my hands?

What if shadows had form that could be touched?

What if I could see through structures?

These mental exercises affected my relationship with reason and validity. Aware of the threat of the ordinary, I embraced the inherent magic in the notion of possibility. I understand possibility as the limitless potential of object, thought, or scenario. This potential extends beyond the apparent and prompts more questions than it …

Contemplative Interiors: Ceramics And Furniture, Alla Myzelev, Kala Stein, James Johnson

Geneseo Authors

Exhibit Catalog for the show Contemplative Interiors exhibited at the Lockhart Gallery at SUNY Geneseo from February 6, 2019-March 15, 2019. Exhibit Curator: Alla Myzelev.

Dress Up, Ye'ela B. Wilschanski

Theses and Dissertations

Dress Up (Performance, 40 minutes) is a dress that functions as a floor, blanket, tablecloth, book and walls. It tells a visual story about domestic care giving rituals, referencing different times and places.

Generic Of, Nicole Levaque

Theses and Dissertations

generic of is a creative text paralleling the creation of my thesis exhibition. I use fragmented layers of narrative, description and prose in the same way each handbuilt ceramic is fired multiple times, allowing the glazes to build upon themselves. This is a close study of the still life, the intimacy of consuming, and how trauma is passed through the gut.

Dearest, Grace Tessein

LSU Master's Theses

Dearest is the examination of what remains of a person, looking to the objects they cherished most while contemplating the inevitability of their certain absence. The work questions the futility of preservation in the measure of time, the failure of memories held in fragile containers, and the decay of the physical body. The materials that compose Dearest are chosen for their innate longevity and their ability to evoke remembrance.

A Synthesis Of Structures, Patrick Kingshill

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

I create compositional structures based on a curated catalog of physical and visual relationships that I have cultivated from my daily life. These compositions are intuitive expressions related to my fascination with the many facets of the built and designed world. My arrangements are curious and intriguing and they unify the expansive diversity of my formal inquiries into a cohesive visual and contemplative experience.

Ceramic and wood are my primary mediums. My interest in woodworking is both aesthetically motivated and nostalgic. I was born in a region of northern California that is historically known for its native giant sequoia and …

In Between, Wansoo Kim

School of Art, Art History, and Design: Theses and Student Creative Work

In my eyes, the world is composed of both revealed things and hidden things. I interpret my surroundings based on this idea, seeking to realize my ignorance and awareness. With this in mind, I create objects in which dichotomous ideas are present, and use their physically revealed and hidden aspects in order to represent the greater human struggle to see and understand what is hidden from us.

The notion of inside and outside is one of my particular subjects. Upon observing an object or a structure, we see only its external reality. I aim to present the unobservable, often presenting …

Xx Openings, Jackson Siegal

Senior Projects Spring 2018

XX Openings represents my dual sculpture and photography practice. The title comes from a 70’s domestic frame, with 20 openings of varying sizes for family pictures. Half of the slots were filled with stock pictures of smiling family scenes, while the others just had measurements for the openings themselves. The object struck me as alienating, and oppressive. I didn’t see any scene within those openings I felt connected to.

The frame came to symbolize varying perspectives, ways of seeing, and ways of being. As my sculpture practice has weighed more heavily on my work as a photographer, I feel tensions …

Misfits, Hanna Newman

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

My figurative ceramic sculptures are comprised of deconstructed, fragmented and simplified renderings of the human form. Within these sculptures I integrate materials such as human hair, fabric, wood and plaster cast body parts to mimic limbs and body mass, creating diversity in the tactile surface quality. The pastel tones, bright colors and additions of hair further obscures the realistic appearance of these beings. Clay's malleability fuels my intuitive creative process and allows me to replicate the human form in ranges from anatomical accuracy to biomorphic abstraction.

I am inspired by the relationship between interiority and exteriority, between the mind and …

Fruitcake, Joshua Schutz

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

I explore figurative ceramics in relationship to gesture and sexual identity. The surfaces reference art history, decorative arts, and popular culture. The quasi-functional components of the work are inspired by my personal relationship with domestic objects and space. But also from the results of capitalism, which has created a materialistic, consumer-based society with heteronormative ideals. I respond to this heteronormativity by utilizing humor as a strategy to discuss subversive topics while simultaneously drawing in the viewer. I intend for the viewer to reflect on the purpose and narrative behind such flamboyant objects.