Fiber, Textile, and Weaving Arts Commons^™

Some Assembly Required, Tanner Maxey

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

The dead do not carry their memory. We do. But when memory becomes the only way we can continue to hold on to our loved ones, how do we derive meaning from the fragments when memory begins to fade? Some Assembly Required examines loss as a condition in which meaning is no longer stable, but must be constructed from what remains. Through an interdisciplinary practice that combines ceramics, textiles, and installation, this work explores how domestic objects—once associated with care, function, and familiarity—can be transformed into fragile, unusable forms that persist as evidence of what has been lost. These objects …

A Community Affair: An Exploration Of The Queer Community, Nightlife, Performance Art And Their Adjacent Qualities, Tatiana M. Castro

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This thesis explores the importance and roll of community in queer artwork, such as drag and burlesque and retroactively also all the work that I create. This paper aims to express this importance by exploring my personal relationship with building community. By interviewing performers selected through a customized-for-savannah voting process, I allowed the community to directly influence my thesis, as well as directly referencing photos of the hands of community members as a continued motif used throughout my work to represent community. This culminated in a two night thesis performance and installation  exhibition that explored performance and how its environment …

Guanacos De Corazón, Ana Marcela Sinnett

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This thesis explores the intersections of indigeneity, mestizaje, and decolonial aesthetics through a mixed-media art practice rooted in Salvadoran history and identity. Drawing on ancestral traditions such as indigo dyeing and backstrap weaving, Guanacos de Corazón investigates how materiality, folklore, and handcraft function as forms of visual resistance, meaning art that disrupts dominant narratives, critiques systems of power, and reclaims erased cultural memory.

Through formal analysis, historical context, and interviews with Salvadoran artists, this thesis challenges ideas of mestizaje that promote cultural and ethnic superiority and contribute to the erasure of ancestral beliefs.

How do we rescue ancestral traditions that …

Encapsulating Scars, Ashley Smith

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

My work explores scars through encapsulation, a desire to enclose and express the emotional scars of memories or physical scars of the body. Life’s experiences impact the living, leaving behind scars that we feel the need to understand. Through the mediums of metal and mixed-media photography, I utilize found and created imagery, as well as a triality of text in order to preserve and remember these scars.

Conceal Reveal, Jacquelyn A. Bolton

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

My work is rooted in the human condition expressed through the materiality of textile and fiber arts and its connection to spirituality. The human condition, as I understand it, is the state of being a person complete with a mind, body, and spirit. This includes all the experiences a person encounters in life—birth, growth, aging, conflict, love, loss, grief, injury, relationships, trauma, rejection, joy, acceptance, and so on. The human condition answers the question: What does it mean to be a person? We are in flux. This ever-changing aspect of “being” is captured in the inherent qualities that are found …

Plot, Meredith F. Conger

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This body of work, Plot, examines the perceptual relationship of the viewer to the landscape that surrounds them through the use of informational paintings that reference, aerial perspective, mark-making and texture. The primary objective of these works is to explore an alternative form of creating contemporary landscape paintings in response to a familiarity with his/her surrounding landscape. As an artist living in middle Georgia, I have always wanted to integrate the subject of landscape into my studio practice.

[P]Lace: Reinterpreting The Feminine, Nicole D. James

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This body of work, [P]lace: Reinterpreting the Feminine, explores the ideas of gender and the the common associations materials, colors, values, etc. have in relationship to the accepted feminine and masculine. Armed with knowledge of these assumptions, my lace sculpture and installation work aims to draw attention to the complications surrounding what we understand as feminine through material transformation. By changing select qualities of the material, I create analogies for assumptions commonly made about women. My ultimate goal is not only material manipulation, but to question some of the fundamental elements we associate with gender itself. I …

Patterns Of Identity, Tameka S. Phillips

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

People interpret and categorize visual cues not only to create a concept of an identity. We assume who a person is, and what their personality is like, based on these visual cues that are in turn plagued with established norms and biases that can connect or divide. Cultural norms, such as gender, sexuality, race, or political standing can be further expressed visually through textile patterns, motifs, and color. Even so, the many cultural signifiers serve only as clues to a person’s identity that encompasses many different cultural aspects, despite common practice to relate to only one. Through my textile statues, …