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 …

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.

Found And Fabricated, Molly S. Davis

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

My MFA written thesis addresses work completed and shown in a thesis exhibition at West Virginia University as well as significant influences to my studio process. While my stated focus is sculpture, the work presented in the exhibition consisted of three sculptural pieces and two sets of prints. This thesis, along with the supporting exhibition, addresses my investigations into the physical properties and tendencies of materials and how that information can guide and inform a work of art. Physical characteristics of the materials such as color, texture, shape, and weight are emphasized and guide the creation of the works in …

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.

She Is Clothed With Strength And Dignity; She Can Laugh At The Days To Come!, Immanuel J. Williams

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Motherhood in the words of Aunt Brenda.

See, we look at our parents first as these godlike figures like they're going to figure it out, not realizing that they were children. They were people. They had dreams and aspirations and all that. And when you strip that away, the title of mother– parent– this woman…. Who is that person?

Well, they're a person. They bleed just like you. They had dreams and thoughts and all that, just like you.

You know, I challenge everybody, you know, take your mother or father off of that godlike pedestal because you'll find that …

Barking With The Dog, Cameron Orr

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Artist Statement

“Barking With The Dog” got its’ title from a poem by Leonard Cohen:

I never really understood

what he said

but every now and then

I find myself

barking with the dog

or bending with the irises

or helping out

in other little ways

“Barking With The Dog” is a series of illustrative collages, linocut prints, an upcycled bench containing personal artifacts, drawings and collage on the walls and floor. These pieces are connected through visual content, physical medium, and artistic intention. The collages are made using upcycled prints and drawings. These pieces represent the early stages of …

Mother Water, Crystal J. Hammerschmidt

Master's Theses

Water is life. That which nurtures, sustains and nourishes. My mother is truly my water. The one who gave me life and has supported and nurtured me though and through. While wading through the challenges and adversity of graduate school, she has been there every step of the way; and while I struggled to find what I was trying to say, I was quietly toiling over thoughts of my own fertility, maternal instincts and desire to nurture something and I began to acknowledge the mortality of my own mother.

The materials and images I combine are deeply connected to my …

"Illumination The Sculpture Of James O. Clark" Catalogue, T. Michael Martin

Faculty & Staff Research and Creative Activity

It has been a challenging journey to mine and sift through the body of work of James O. Clark to select a representation of his studio practice and 50-year career. While curating "Illumination: the Sculpture of James O. Clark," I encountered more than the common curatorial concerns such as artwork availability, scale, aesthetic and conceptual themes, transportation and presentation issues. During my conversations with Clark, we found ourselves in an unprecedented pandemic – impacting travel, shipping, and studio visits.Throughout this process, Clark and I remained flexible to ensure a representation of his career could be exhibited without compromise. Selections for …

Dissonant Forms: Landscape, Nature-Love, And Art, Taylor F. Benoit

Masters Theses

As artists continue the long and storied lineage of Landscape, are there aesthetic responsibilities that come with representing the forces that afford you the capacity to do so? As we delineate spaces into places, endless interconnectivity into knowable “systems”, and living matter into thing based taxonomies, who do these delineations serve and with what intentions do we proceed? My studio art practice explores what it means to give form to our Former—the Former being that from which we came, the here and now, our explicit ecological reality, the stuff of what we call nature. …

Sapping, Smudging, Staining: A Feminized Body, Breslin Shea Bell

Masters Theses

This book—of poetry, prose, and lists—muses on the effects of liquidity and leakiness of a feminized body. By bringing echo narrative, illegibility, de-telling, and that which is continuously wet to the viewer’s body and space, this book and accompanying multimedia installation provides a lens to consider reproductive rights, body autonomy, and gender-based aggression and violence. Work of matter and color investigates interiority, both bodily and spatial, as it relates to surface, access, and space-making.

In The Garden, Clare Samani

LSU Master's Theses

My work has focused largely on identity and self-expression, primarily through clothing, pattern, and color as a symbolic content. Having heavily investigated historical costume and clothing from various periods, my attention is drawn to the highly sculptural and ornamented garments of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the rococo, and the baroque. In these colorful and puffed garments, I am attracted to the similarities that I see in nature. How we adorn ourselves mimics various flowers, plants and animals in the pursuit of desire and procreation. Focusing on fabric manipulation, printmaking and sculpture, In the Garden coalesces into ambiguous sculptures that …

Good Grief, Madeleine Pearl Buzbee

Senior Projects Spring 2020

“Good Grief” is a memorial project that began with the loss of my childhood best friend, Camille Sdao (1998-2019). She was a light.

Grief is a thing that is carried, compartmentalized, expanded, forgotten, and remembered. Grief is nothing and everything at the same time. Grief explodes, lingers, leaves and returns again. Grief is blue. I know this because Louise Bourgeois, Maggie Nelson, Taryn Simon, the Pacific Ocean, my tears, the sky, my mother, and my grandmother have taught me this. Loss means wading in deep waters for a long time and you must build a boat to stay afloat.

Consumed …

In The Shadows And Folds, Julia Mueller

Senior Projects Spring 2020

In the shadows and folds is the result of a mental scavenger hunt that I began this past year, to uncover myself and find what is hidden in my crevices. It was spurred by my fear of memory loss which had grown to such a size that it sat visible in the back of my mind unaddressed for some time. The reason for this fear is not large but it feels monumental. I have been existing in various states of sadness and disconnect, which have acted like a thick blanket over my mind. This blanket is simultaneously protective and damaging, …

Darwin Or Frankenstein?, Sylvia S. Santamaria

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Through sculpture and drawing, I create my own versions of natural specimens primarily based upon the visual unity of disparate organisms. Invented specimens are composed using a variety of processes employing a mixture of atypical materials following the (20^th, 21^st century) Postmodern shift away from formalist and traditional uses of any singular medium. As well as a variety of art materials, the specimens are hybrids of organic and biomorphic elements, blurring boundaries between botanical, animal, fungal, metal, and mineral. Is my approach perhaps like Charles Darwin, observant and studious naturalist, or am I more like Dr. Frankenstein, …

A Spectacle And Nothing Strange, Taylor Z. King

Theses and Dissertations

Working through methods of abstraction and comedic mimicry I choreograph awkwardly balanced sculpture with objects of adornment as a means to defuse personal sensitivities surrounding my experiences of gender, desire, and home. The research that follows is concerned with the adjacent, the in between, above and underneath, because I feel that this kind of looking means that you are, to some degree, aware of what lies at the edges. Maybe this is what Gertrude Stein means to act as though there is no use in a center—because this concerns a way of relating, though there are many things in the …

Unmaking As Making, Viola Bordon

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Artist Viola Bordon examines the processes of touch, unmaking, and materially dictated aesthetics regarding her studio practice. The philosophical ideas of absence are used to establish a purpose for undoing, which is then explored as a learning process. This process is complicated by the sense of touch, resulting in formal aesthetics that are materially inspired.

Leonard Baskin: Imaginary Artists, Kathya M. Lopez, Erica M. Schaumberg

Schmucker Art Catalogs

Leonard Baskin (1922-2000) was an American sculptor, illustrator, and printmaker. He is perhaps best known as a figurative sculptor and a creator of monumental woodcuts. The Gehenna Press, Baskin’s private press, operated for over 50 years (1942-2000) and produced more than 100 volumes of fine art books. His most prominent public commissions include sculpture for the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial and the Woodrow Wilson Memorial, both in Washington D.C., and the Holocaust Memorial in Ann Arbor, MI. Baskin received numerous honors, among them a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Gold Medal of the National Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Jewish …

Cycles Of Growth And Decay, And Changing The Beautiful To The Grotesque: Installation Through The Lens Of Printmaking, Madeline R. Cochran

All College Thesis Program, 2016-2019

The intention of this project is to create an installation informed by printmaking processes and to explore the tension between what is fragile and delicate and what is decaying and visceral. Specifically, I am working with materials I find delicate and beautiful including: fine Japanese paper, lace, yarn and embroidery floss. I am coating and manipulating these materials with wax, epoxy-resin and baby oil to give the work a fleshy and unsettling feel. Through the process of working with these materials, I have created paper sculptures made from a mold cast from my own torso, miniature books made from monoprints …

Cold Lapse, Tressa Jones

Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers

cold lapse addresses the abstract notions of time and loss while conveying the value of observing the present. The postmodern view of time, the grid’s vernacular, and the aesthetics of postminimalism are my foundation for communicating time’s passage and its consequential sensations of absence. The duration of a slow drip, the cycle of breath and the sequential motion of a hand folding paper each mark passing moments. By observing these signs the phenomenon of time may be appreciated. Care and ephemerality in the work require the viewer’s sensitivity when encountering and witnessing it, much like the demands of observing the …

Design Of Spatial Interstices, Byron Hiroyuki Kato

All Master's Theses

It was the purpose of this study: (1) to develop an idea visually as well as to articulate it in writing; (2) to evolve and develop illusions and realities of spatial interstices (spatial framents) as positive elements of two and three dimensional form; (3) to articulate, as objectively as possible, an analysis of the body of creative work.