Art and Design Commons^™

You Are What You Wear: A Vital Materialism Of Textiles, Walter J. Greenleaf Iv

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Intermedial artworks are deemed effective when they draw from the roots of the most basic, universal elements of materiality, concept, sensation, and/or experience, melding disparate elements into an inextricable novelty. As hybrid artifacts, they take up an unusual degree of substance in one dimension or another, and can at times be difficult to categorize, describe, or document. Nonetheless, the potential for intermedial expressions to resonate with their viewership is strengthened by the depths to which the artist ventures, and through such a process the most far-reaching and complexly interconnected issues of our time can be made approachable on the personal …

Examining Our Relationship With Death: A Participatory Art Project, Lia A. Davido

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Death is a fact of life, yet researchers such as Caitlin Doughty, Todd Harra, Ernest Becker, and others, have found that people deem death a taboo topic of conversation. Doughty herself started a social movement, death positivity, to encourage this taboo to be broken, and to normalize talking about death. However these researchers published their findings in the early to mid 2010’s, before a major pandemic made death a more common occurrence for people. Inspired by previous researchers' experiences, this project asks the question: How do people feel about death now, and can socially engaged art create a space where …

Climate Action At The University Of Maine: A Documentary Short Film, Santiago Tijerina

Honors College

Fossil fuel divestment is central to the discourse surrounding climate change, nevertheless, it is a movement driven by student activists and it is a sign of institutional change at a global scale. Climate Action at the University of Maine, written and directed by Santiago Tijerina and created in collaboration with the University of Maine and the Center for Undergraduate Research (CUGR), is a documentary short film driven by the research objective of understanding the rise of student activism at the University of Maine and the recent decision of the Board of Trustees to divest from fossil fuels.

The subject matter …

Where Do I Belong In The United States Public School System?, Christiana R. Becker

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

I seek to inquire about the world as it relates to my identity as a first generation descent of the Penobscot tribe living in the United States by utilizing four methodologies in my research: life histories/autobiographies, narrative inquiry, a/r/tography and practice-based and practice-led. Through coupling my artistic practice with those four methodologies I am able to creatively show the information I have unearthed in hopes that others will benefit from a fresh and augmented understanding of what it historically and culturally means to be a part of a community that makes up a very small percentage of the United States …

Paper, Pulp, And Place: Investigating Connections Through Process Art, Olivia Bradstreet

Honors College

A small papermaking studio was assembled for making archival quality handmade papers and pulps appropriate for printmaking, book arts, and paper cast to demonstrate the connections between artist practice, materials, and medium through process art. In the home studio a variety of machine-made cotton and abaca linters from an artist supplier were torn by hand and beaten by individual fiber types with a standard kitchen blender. Common papermaking additives were mixed into the pulp in controlled measurements to improve quality and colors. Application of the wet sheets and pulps for papercast and dried 3-dimensional paper sheets demonstrated that the blender …

Transdisciplinary Creative Ecologies In Contemporary Art Within Emergent Processes, Siglinde Langholz Villarreal

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This research is composing in the moving with affective speeds and rhythms, instead of unfolding direct and in linear ways. It is important to come across different planes of composition in movement. There are so many planes of voices spinning around in relation. Research-creation seems as forms of relations and an invitation to appreciate the collectivity at the heart of thinking. The many entering-into relation within a differential thought in the making of its own.

Emergent properties in non-human interactions, such as those presented in Steven Shaviro ́s Against Self-Organization (2009) and Brain Massumi, are symptomatic of how individualities relate …

Liminal Surfaces, Georgina E. Grenier

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The poet Ben Okri wrote: “Stories are the secret reservoir of values: change the stories individuals and nations live by and tell themselves, and you change the individuals and nations.” (Stibbe)

In the early 21st Century we are facing numerous environmental problems that are being caused by human activity. This era is termed the Anthropocene , a time when accumulated pollutants are causing detrimental ecological change. Ocean creatures are threatened by increasing seawater temperature, acidifying pH levels and melting ice. On land we are experiencing droughts, alteration of biomes, extinctions and an atmosphere that contains less oxygen per breath than …

Littlefield Gallery Visiting Artist Series - Kazumi Hoshino, The University Of Maine Department Of Art

Cultural Affairs Distinguished Lecture Series

As part of the ongoing department initiative, The LIttlefield Gallery Visiting Artist Series, Maine sculptor Kazumi Hoshino will be our visiting artist-in-residence, May 1-5, 2017. Hoshino will provide daily demonstrations and art talks in and around the sculpture studio, free and open to the public and campus community. Hoshino will be working with various carving techniques in stone using both Japanese and American techniques and will create multiple stones that work together as a visually integrated single sculpture. The finished piece will later be installed in the lobby of the New Balance Recreation Center. The sculpture will also be scanned …

We Are Cells Living In The World While The World Lives In Us, Tara Law

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

What has been called the Anthropocene epoch is the first period of time in which human activities and technological advances have measurably contributed to climate changes. It is common to live in the shadow of industrial architecture. The landscapes we live in and the changes to our air, soil, and water quality are interconnected. Our bodies are made up of cells moving through the world, but the world also moves through us. I’m interested in how our environment changes us and what we can do to change our environment.

An exploration of book forms and by extension the many forms …

The Sacred Art Of Labyrinth Design: Optimization Of A Liminal Aesthetic, Yadina Z. Clark

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This paper provides an overview of both practical and esoteric elements that inform the labyrinth design process and touches on the physiological and psychological effects of meditative walking. In addition to new installations, some other outcomes that have resulted from this research include an interactive online map of over 200 labyrinths in New England and two simple formulas for accurately calculating the path length of both 3- and 7-circuit Classical labyrinths.

Labyrinths, in their true, non-maze forms, have existed for thousands of years in numerous places around the world and there are similarities in the designs and uses of these …

Littlefield Gallery Visiting Artist Series - Andreas Von Huene: Figurative Sculpture, The University Of Maine

Cultural Affairs Distinguished Lecture Series

Andreas Von Huene will give a lecture on interpretive figural sculpture and the next day he will give figurative sculpture demonstrations in the sculpture studios.

Littlefield Gallery Visiting Artist Series - Mark Herrington: Sculpting In The Moment, University Of Maine College Of Liberal Arts And Sciences

Cultural Affairs Distinguished Lecture Series

Maine Sculptor Mark Herrington will be our Visiting Artist in Residence April 27-May 1, 2015. Herrington will provide daily demonstrations and art talks in and around the Sculpture Studio, free and open to the public and campus community. Herrington will be working with various carving techniques in stone, culminating that week in a finished sculpture that will eventually be placed in a garden on campus designed by Elaine Elliot. This work will also be scanned and we will produce a smaller scale version from a 3D printer on campus.

Maria J.C. A’ Becket: Rediscovering An American Artist, Christopher Volpe

Maine History

Maria J.C. a’ Becket (or Beckett, as she originally spelled her name) got her start as an artist in Portland, Maine and moved on to new venues in Boston, New York, Bar Harbor, and St.Augustine. She studied in France with well-known Barbizon School landscape painters and returned to American to develop a distinctly personal and American version of the genre. Although her work and legacy are obscure today, Becket was a pioneer professional woman painter and arguably the first woman to build a career as a landscape painter by popularizing the Barbizon style in America. Christopher Volpe moved to New …

Winslow Homer’S Seascapes: Transcendental Subjects, Popular Resorts, Critical Reactions, Priscilla Paton

Maine History

Winslow Homer, acknowledged as a quintessential Yankee and one of America 's foremost nineteenth century artists, seems as formidable, stern, and ambiguous as the rocky shores that fascinated him. Homer's reception by critics highlights the impossibility of separating artistic achievement from the tastes and fashions of the society in which the artist worked. The “mystifyingly blank" faces that critics abhorred in Homer's early farm figures became the distinctively attractive features of his later seascapes.