Art and Materials Conservation Commons^™

Objective, April L. Startzel

Student Projects

This thesis presents a body of paintings that explore the tension between lived experience, memory, and digitally constructed identity. Through layered narrative compositions, the work examines how individuals navigate and internalize multiple versions of themselves within an increasingly image-driven and digitally mediated world. Familiar objects, childhood references, and symbolic imagery serve as accessible entry points, while distortions in scale, composition, and material disrupt immediate recognition and invite active interpretation.

By integrating vivid color, dense compositions, and tactile elements such as polymer clay, the paintings emphasize the contrast between physical materiality and the flatness of digital screens. The recurring square format …

Veils Of The Unseen, Shinwoo Song

Art Theses and Dissertations

This thesis explores the dynamic interplay between consciousness and unconsciousness and how this relationship influences visual language in my art practice. My research investigates how unconscious impulses and conscious choices intersect in the creative process, shaping artistic expression and viewer interpretation. I examine how visual art can serve as a medium through which hidden emotional and psychological states, such as memory, desire, and internal conflict, emerge and take form. Rooted in the practice of automatism and influenced by Surrealist strategies, my work engages with theories by Jacques Lacan, particularly his notion of the gaze, and Gilles Deleuze’s concepts of extraction …

Margins (I Nvr Needed Acceptance From All U Outsiders), Jahi Lendor

Masters Theses

A comedian said, “American pie isn’t made out of apples, it’s made out of whatever you can get your fucking hands on.”1 With that, my work seeks to provide an honest representation of the infinite value of the everydayness and behavior of blackness ranging from trauma to beauty. Various mediums explore culture, class, collective memory, identity, and erasure. While resisting institutional and systemic boundaries between disciplines my practice actively seeks fluidity between media. The work often translates to (social) poetic-bricolage visualizations that combine gestures of assemblage, sculpture, installation, and painting. The work focuses on reflecting on how I see life …

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, …

Andean Textile Traditions: Material Knowledge And Culture, Part 1, Elena Phipps

PreColumbian Textile Conference VII / Jornadas de Textiles PreColombinos VII (2016)

The development of rich and complex Andean textile traditions spanned millennia, in concert with the development of cultures that utilized textiles as a primary form of expression and communication. Understanding the importance of textiles in the Andean world, we can examine elements of their genesis and look at the trajectory from the earliest developments of fiber- made items to the extraordinarily complex and specific processes of textile making, such as warp-wrapping and discontinuous warp and weft weaving. These processes are examined in the context of the relationship between textiles and the sacred, highlighting the significance and agency of cloth in …