Printmaking Commons^™

Plurality Of Place: A Critical Walk Through The Ananda Meditation Retreat, Heidi L. Cram

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

This autoethnographic research project is located in the fertile literary world of authors Gary Snyder and J. Donald Walters’s historic Bald Mountain land cooperative in Northern CA. This is the site of Walters’s Ananda Meditation Retreat, and Snyder's Ring of Bones Zendo. The project takes a creative embodied approach to analyzing and contributing to this location's literature of place through the genres of creative nonfiction and interpretive mapping. The cooperative's focus on Eastern and Indigenous spiritual practice seeded the countercultural bubble which surrounds these two institutions and generated a ripple of rich and varied literature of place. Through autoethnographic inquiry, …

Wordless And Anthropomorphic Picture Books Featuring Insect Characters, Jocelyn Norcross

Children's Book Writing and Illustrating (MFA) Theses

This thesis explores the intersection of wordless narration and insect anthropomorphism in children’s literature through the creation and analysis of three original picture books: Clawula, Fly, and Home. These works utilize wordless (or near-wordless) storytelling to feature insect characters that possess human emotional qualities while remaining grounded in their true biological environments.

The research begins with a historical overview of wordless picture books, examining their definition, educational utility, and global classification as "silent books." To establish a foundation for visual narrative techniques, a case study is conducted on the wordless trilogy of South Korean author-illustrator Suzy Lee, …

A Pageant Of Spectacles: Chromolithography In America, Matthew H. Edney Phd

Osher Map Library Exhibition Catalogs

Chromolithography was used in the nineteenth century to create full-color and realistic images of the world. A Pageant of Spectacles: Chromolithography in Nineteenth-Century America, an exhibition at the Osher Map Library from November 30th, 2023 - June 29th, 2024, explained the printing process and explored some of its particular applications to maps and bird’s-eye views. This exhibition catalog features the companion article Mapping, Printing, and Color, which explores the history of different printing processes used in mapmaking throughout history, as well as a catalog of the items displayed in the exhibition.

A digital version of exhibition is available …

The Demand For Attention: Notification Technology And The Restructuring Of Communication, Sabrina Feld

Scripps Senior Theses

This thesis argues that notifications are not merely features of digital devices but infrastructural forces that quietly reorganize the conditions under which communication is perceived, enacted, and understood. Drawing on Science, Technology, and Society (STS) frameworks, specifically Actor-Network Theory and Langdon Winner's concept of Forms of Life, the first chapter traces how notifications produce a Form of Life organized around continuous responsiveness, in which incoming information appears as a pending demand, silence carries new moral weight, and the capacity for self-determined availability is structurally foreclosed. Understood this way, notifications become a case study for a broader pattern in which technological …

Herp Count 2025, Camryn Gulledge

Graduate Theses/Dissertations

Herp Count 2025 is a process-based project in which I log and document every herp (reptile or amphibian) I encounter in the wild while investigating the realities of human impact on ecosystems. During 2025, I observed 1,406 individual herps, most of which appeared not in remote wilderness but in the compromised margins of human spaces. When I observe them in a littered area, I collect nearby trash and bring it back to my studio to combine it with a detailed drawing of that specific individual. In my Contact series, I use a clean-touch printmaking process that involves a stretched plastic …

Light And Unseen, Daša Kulikova

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is a body of paintings and two poetic fragments. Shaped by distance and displacement, the work finds its ground in the tension between the desire to be free from the past and heal, and longing for home and connection. Painting practice becomes an event of contact with what is lost, or unclear, or in the process of becoming through accumulating layers, marks, erasures, and traces of the process of its making.

Sensory Constellations, Madaline K. Gardner

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis situates neurodiversity within the field of fine arts by integrating disability studies, institutional critique, and material practices in painting and printmaking. Through visual analysis and studio-based research, the project examines how tactile engagement, color relationships, and repetitive mark-making can articulate embodied experiences of neurodivergence. It challenges dominant institutional frameworks that pathologize neurodivergent behaviors by reframing stimming as a generative and communicative practice. The resulting body of work includes both image-making and the creation of tactile objects designed to facilitate sensory interaction. The thesis proposes alternative ways of understanding artistic practice and accessibility within art institutions.

Investigating The Relationship Between Noun Classes And Plant Folk Taxonomy In Chasu Language Of Kilimanjaro Region In Tanzania, Peter Rabson Mziray

Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences

The current study investigates the relationship between noun classes and plant folk taxonomy in Chasu (G 22). The study focuses on two objectives: the first objective is to describe the plant folk taxonomy in Chasu and the second objective is to determine the relationship between noun classes and plant folk taxonomy in Chasu. Data were collected from rural villages in Same and Mwanga districts by using free listing, field interviews (jungle-walk-and-identify), and written texts containing Chasu plant names. The findings reveal that Chasu folk taxonomy reflects different ethnobotanical categories; including a unique beginner which is mmea/mimea ‘plant(s)’, and three life …

The Adjacent Possible, Marcus O’Donnell Prof

Staff Scholarship - Australia & Dubai

My hybrid traditional-digital prints explore pattern, chaos and complexity at the intersection of bodies, sexuality, and landscape. The ‘Strange appearance’ series overprints photogravure key plates, (developed through layering several original images of urban gardens) onto multiple colour pigment prints of close focus details of flowers or foliage. This process creates micro landscapes and variants which change in colour and form as layers intersect. This exhibition uses three different key plates over a repeated sequence of the same twenty colour underprints. These different approaches to variation, multiplicity and adjacency speak to both possibility and mutation: the open and the determined aspects …

Accessible Art: Connecting Community Through Artistic Expression, Michaela M. Speers

Art and Art History Summer Fellows

I answered an important investigative question: How can we use art to connect our community? I illustrated, produced, and installed a “Mini Art Vending Machine” on campus to provide the Ursinus College community easy access to original works of art. I explored visual topics that would connect not only current students, but also prospective students, alumni, and members of the Collegeville community.

The Mini Art Vending Machine's permanent home is within Schellhase Commons. However, the machine will frequently move locations to further enhance events or to bring further exposure to the student artists. You can expect to see it at …

Unraveling Landscape Stories, Marcus O’Donnell Prof

Staff Scholarship - Australia & Dubai

In Silvi Glattauer’s photographic practice nothing is set, time, light and landscape are each staged in unexpected ways. An image is never singular: often literally composed from multiple exposures, always taken through multiple processes, and always opening a dialogue with the rich history of her own work and the work of other artists. For Glattauer photography, and more particularly printmaking, isn’t about fixing an image it is about opening it up. It is work marked by nimble curiosity and although it is often technically startling it is never about technique, rather, it is about an ethic of slow looking.

The Blue Below Still Breathes, Yiyi Wang

Masters Theses

The Blue Below Still Breathes explores disappearance transformation rather than loss—a shift in visibility that reveals the pressures, absences, and structures shaping perception. Across interactive installations and print works, I examine how power operates through omission, fragility, and formal control. At the heart of this practice is printmaking, reimagined as a responsive, impermanent medium that challenges its historical association with fixedness.

The thesis installation features a 5x5 grid of thermochromic screenprints of a concrete wall, where viewer proximity activates a randomized sequence of heating panels. As heat raises the temperature of the surface, a field of blue gradually emerges, breaking …

Silent Veins, Yinghan Zhang

Masters Theses

My art is founded on the scholar stones in my home in China. These are rocks once collected by ancient scholars and poets, who admired their natural forms for their aesthetic beauty and philosophical qualities. These silent creations of nature are at the heart of my creative inspiration. They serve as spiritual vessels, connecting natural philosophy with personal memory. I listen to the whispers of time within the textures of stone and paper through the contemporary expression of traditional techniques such as rubbing and water-based woodcut, allowing otherwise silent materials to speak a language spanning centuries. In this thesis, Silent …

Embodied Archives, Emerging Futures, Xuân-Lam Nguyen

Masters Theses

Fifty years after the end of the U.S.–Vietnam War, this thesis reflects on the entangled relationship between the two nations, inspiring hope while challenging dominant representations of trauma and tragedy. Drawing from autobiography, family history, folk art traditions, colonial photographs, hierarchies within art history, archives of student activism, and key geopolitical events, the work explores the complex intersections of queer identity and glitchy historical narratives. Combining research-based inquiry with time- and labor-intensive processes, it reimagines historical materials to construct alternate possibilities for the future.

Pressing Into Absence, Linda Sok

Masters Theses

Pressing into Absence traces the materials, processes, and works I have engaged with between March 2023 and May 2025, positioning historical and contemporary narratives in dialogue with one another. This book interweaves colonial-era source materials (from 1864- 1928) - writings, etchings, and paintings of Cambodia produced by persons from the United States of America and France - with personal anecdotes from my travels to Cambodia in 2024. These accounts are layered alongside speculative reflections in the form of text, sketches, mind maps, and material explorations. These archival remnants and personal experiences are folded together and positioned as equally reliable sources. …

Parts That Cannot Be Found, Amber Baggette

LSU Master's Theses

Parts That Cannot Be Found is a body of work where I use imagery of trees that are sick or injured, to show my struggles as a person who has been in survival mode their whole life. I use the facts I found in the book “The Hidden Life of Trees,” by Peter Wohlleben, where he describes what trees do and how and why they feel. Since I hold trees in high regard, I started researching how they function. Trees are living beings, and ignoring their presence is tragic. Throughout this paper, I contextualize my work by exploring specific printmaking …

Weep No More, My Lady (Oh! Weep No More Today): Love, Violence, Printmaking, And Kentuckian Futurity, Madison Brown, Marshall Brown

Bachelor of Fine Arts Senior Papers

Situated within a regressive political climate, this essay considers the writer’s thesis artwork Weep No More, My Lady as a simultaneous account of Southern gendered violence and a desire for healing. Through personal and historical connections to Kentucky’s material culture, the work navigates binaries of class, race, and gender that have dictated the dominant contemporary conception of the region. Placing the competing forces of care and brutality in dialogue, Weep No More, My Lady translates these theoretical challenges into formal attributes. The work suggests modes of making — stitching, unraveling, tearing — can act against the construction and naturalization of …

How Much Touch Can The Paper Withstand?, Aldrin Regina Valdez

Theses and Dissertations

Between embodiment and disembodiment, Aldrin Regina Valdez’s works on paper map histories of care, violence, and mourning, both personal and collective. They ask: how much touch can the paper withstand?

The Function Of Art, Magdalen O. M. Pickering

Theses and Dissertations

With the help of machines and the powers of perception, Magdalen Pickering introduces logic to strange and fantastical subjects. The Function of Art explores a hybrid of techniques in painting, screenprinting, and computer generated imagery as Magdalen attempts to use generative printing to obscure art historical consciousness. The installation crosses into virtual reality; reframing textiles, landscapes, and the gallery space through a metaphysical lens.

Coffee Bindings, M. Ermolenko

Theses and Dissertations

Coffee Bindings is a multi-media interactive installation weaving themes of history, memory, death, and spaces that no longer exist through the lens of coffee readings and a mixture of physical and digital media. By navigating ghost spaces (spaces/places that used to exist but don’t anymore), and looking at survival through three time periods, Coffee Bindings jumps through liminal time and space, navigating the Armenian Genocide of 1915, the ethnic cleansing and displacement of Armenians from Artsakh in 2020-2024, while also tying them to personal family history with the death of my father and the loss of the physical space of …

Illustrating Identity: Ethel Reed’S Art Posters And Women's Claims To Public Space In Fin-De-Siècle Boston, Miranda R. Knofczynski

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

Much scholarship has uncovered the history of women illustrators during the late nineteenth century. The rebuilding of these lost histories calls for research which theorizes women’s contributions to the burgeoning arts scene of the fin-de-siècle. This thesis will examine the posters Ethel Reed created for different companies during the height of the 1890s poster craze and discuss how she articulated women in public space in them. Reed’s art offers an aestheticized yet feminist visualization of women engaging in leisure activities such as exploring the city, reading, or attending the theatre. Many have described the women in her posters as merely …

Recollections Of A Tejana Life, Carolina Yáñez

Art Theses and Dissertations

This thesis encompasses the life of a young woman navigating life in Texas through various political and social barriers. My interdisciplinary practice analyzes the historical context of Mexicans in Texas from its Revolutionary period into current injustices. Through fiber, printmaking, and photography I create a visual diary to illustrate what the political has made personal. These works display the beauty of Tejano culture, but also the power struggles that threaten communities I care for, as well as my own existence that persists against far-right wing agendas.

Current politics and government leadership in Texas have inspired me to make artwork calling …

I'M Still Eating Crayons., Eisey Eisenhardt

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

im still eating crayons serves as a reflection on past events experienced in trying conditions after many years of rumination. The title itself is derived from my childhood inclination towards physically experiencing color and texture via chewing on crayons. An inclination that I still experience today; a wish to chew on what captivates me and break it down over time within, so that I may discover a deeper connection with those objects, ideas, and concepts. Not all made discoveries were victories, nor do they place my conscious in a better position than it was at the height of my past …

Inner Bonds, Caitlin M. Maltbie

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The artist, Cait Maltbie, discusses their Master of Fine Arts exhibition, Inner Bonds, which was installed at Slocumb Galleries in Johnson City, TN, from March 24, 2025, through April 4, 2025, with a public reception held on March 27, 2025. The exhibition consisted of multi-disciplinary work: zines, screenprints, and a sculptural installation mimicking the scenery and emotional environment of the imaginary Inner Bonds world. Inner Bonds refers to their comic series about feelings and how they are handled, from which all the content for this exhibition is derived. The work is focused on deconstructing the artist’s feelings so that they …

Held On By A Thread, Annie M. Hutchins

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

The artist, Annie Hutchins, discusses her Master of Fine Arts thesis exhibition, Held on by a Thread, which was installed at Tipton Gallery in Johnson City, TN, from March 6, 2025, through March 28, 2025, with a public reception held on March 7, 2025. The exhibition is a collection of textile works containing repurposed material artifacts of the life she shared with her maternal family since childhood. The artwork incorporates found objects from the artist’s home, including domestic textiles, clothing, handmade sewing projects, family photographs, and sewing notions. The artworks are made using the printmaking technique of photo emulsion screen …

The Art Of Travel, Colleen Bergmann, Joshua Fackler, Natalie Heiland, Sarah Louise Huebschen, Charlotte Ji, Grace Jurchak, Lizzy Kramer, Mathea Linden, Jake Neff, West Rathbun, Daniela Rodriguez, Alice L. Van Etten, Dalila E. Weismantle, Annie Witham, Yan Sun

Schmucker Art Catalogs

Under the direction of Professor Yan Sun, student curators examine the theme of travel in both Eastern and Western works of art. Exploring topics such as artists’ trips, the imagined landscape, pilgrimages, tourism, and modes of travel, the exhibition features prints, paintings, carvings, photography and material culture.

Cover Art - Suspicous Baby, Georgia Leakey

The Messenger

Design by Helen Mei

Self Portrait, Georgia Leakey

The Messenger

No abstract provided.

Syncretic Spirits / Espíritus Sincréticos, Angelica Tapia - Estrada

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

Syncretic Spirits / Espíritus Sincréticos is a multimedia exhibition that invites viewers into a fantastical space where cultural identity and perception intertwine. Colorful shaped panels, sculptural installations, prints, and drawings bridge physical and metaphysical realms. Personal archetypes intuitively inspired by natural forms drive the work.

Influenced by the dualities of my upbringing as a first-generation Mexican American, I was immersed in Mexican culture through my family traditions while finding a home in the nurturing embrace of the heartland. The work has become a means of reclaiming a new layered sense of self, disentangling from my Catholic upbringing, embracing indigenous healing …

Spectre And Stem, Marcus O’Donnell Prof

Staff Scholarship - Australia & Dubai

Since 2014 Baldessin Studio has collaborated with the State Library Victoria and two generous donors[i] to offer an opportunity for printmakers to immerse themselves in the library’s extensive collection of books, objects and documents as well as accessing the facilities and expertise of Baldessin’s St Andrews Studio. The work that has emerged from these fellowships are unique examples of research-based printmaking. This article explores the practice of Sorcha Mackenzie and Nicholas Hubicki 2023 Fellows and accompanied an exhibition of their work at the Print Council of Australia