Sculpture Commons^™

چھپن چھپائی (Chupan Chupai), Muhammad Talha Mr

Masters Theses

Baji, how do you breathe in a burqa? Doesn’t it suffocate you? Don't ask too many questions, walk straight, and don’t let go of my hand. Men were standing in the street, and she was trying to avoid them, walking as fast as she could, almost dragging me. I saw a big wedding tent. It was a multi-colored, red, yellow, blue, and green pattern. I asked baji, Is that where we are going? She nodded in affirmation. The tent was beautiful. I saw kids peeking inside the tent, and it reminded me of a time when I was doing the …

Household Hegemon: Domestic And Affective Traces Of Us Influence In Mexico In The 1950s And 1990s, Edgar Solórzano

Masters Theses

“Household Hegemon: Domestic and Affective Traces of US Influence in Mexico in the 1950s and 1990s” is a collection of personal essays, historical research, and fictional texts that examine the impact of US-American soft power on Mexican society. This project expands and deepens the research and work developed during my two-year MFA in Sculpture at RISD, evolving material investigations into a comprehensive written and visual record of the 1950s post-WWII boom and the 1990s post-NAFTA transition. These two decades not only represent the most significant in terms of American influence but also the years in which my parents and I …

What Is Mine, Yours And Ours: Bodily Metaphor And Neuropsychology, Alicia K.E Parham

Art Theses and Dissertations

Mapping the landscape of the brain has taken human lifetimes to navigate, both structurally to understand how our biological functions interact and functionally as our thoughts and emotions shape our existence. Neurological stimulus and response inform our reality, shape our thinking, and affect our bodies in profound physiological ways. Our nervous system acts as a bridge from what we experience physically to what we feel emotionally, through the sending of electrical signals to all parts of our body.

My art practice explores the interactions of neuroscience with outside stimuli. It is rooted in the personal: learning that a neurological condition …

Read The Fine Print, Kayla Lockwood

UNLV Theses, Dissertations, Professional Papers, and Capstones

read the fine print is a two-floor art installation that investigates how midcentury domestic ideology structured bodies, behavior, and perception through visual, spatial, and material systems. Rather than recreating a home interior, it examines how domestic order was engineered across the United States through color coding, planning diagrams, model environments, controlled decoration, and institutional messaging. The two-floor arrangement mirrors the operation of these systems across registers, moving from overt structures of order to quieter, often obscured consequences. By rendering policy, hierarchy, and expectation materially, the installation invites viewers to consider domesticity as a designed system: a set of practices, forms, …

Weathered, Haylee A. Dyess

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

Weathered focuses on themes of change, accumulation, time, and acceptance. Each artwork holds layers of information and experiences that form a unique narrative for all its viewers. The construction of each piece is a symbol of the physical ability it takes to create each painting. After my mobility was hindered due to my medical conditions, a new appreciation for physical health and the world I live in was gained. Striving to pack this sense of appreciation into my work, my method became a way for me to cope with my illness and to enjoy being creative, freely.

My art is …

An Introduction To East Asian Art: Tour Guide #3, The Year 1591, Victoria Weston

OER Textbooks

Please Note: This tour guide is the third in Victoria Weston's An Introduction to East Asian Art in Three Journeys. To access the full book, visit https://scholarworks.umb.edu/oer_textbooks/3/

For the remaining sections, visit:

Guide Part 1: https://scholarworks.umb.edu/oer_textbooks/4/

Guide Part 2: https://scholarworks.umb.edu/oer_textbooks/5/ This book is an introduction to important art forms practiced in China, the Korean peninsula, and Japan. It is in no way an encyclopedic treatment of the art histories of East Asia. Rather, it is a textbook for a single semester course. Each section is devoted to one year in time and framed by historical factors that naturally encourage comparative …

An Introduction To East Asian Art: Tour Guide #2, The Year 1230, Victoria Weston

OER Textbooks

Please Note: This is the second of three tour guides connected to Victoria Weston's Introduction to East Asian Art. For the full guidebook, visit https://scholarworks.umb.edu/oer_textbooks/3/

The remaining sections can be found at these links:

Guide Part 1: https://scholarworks.umb.edu/oer_textbooks/4/

Guide Part 3: https://scholarworks.umb.edu/oer_textbooks/6/

This book is an introduction to important art forms practiced in China, the Korean peninsula, and Japan. It is in no way an encyclopedic treatment of the art histories of East Asia. Rather, it is a textbook for a single semester course. Each section is devoted to one year in time and framed by historical factors that naturally …

An Introduction To East Asian Art In Three Journeys, Victoria Weston

OER Textbooks

Please Note: This is the full version of this record. For individual tour guides, visit the following links:

Guide Part 1: https://scholarworks.umb.edu/oer_textbooks/4/ Guide Part 2: https://scholarworks.umb.edu/oer_textbooks/5/ Guide Part 3: https://scholarworks.umb.edu/oer_textbooks/6/

This book is an introduction to important art forms practiced in China, the Korean peninsula, and Japan. It is in no way an encyclopedic treatment of the art histories of East Asia. Rather, it is a textbook for a single semester course. Each section is devoted to one year in time and framed by historical factors that naturally encourage comparative analysis. Students learn methods of visual analysis while also exploring …

An Introduction To East Asian Art: Tour Guide #1, The Year 748, Victoria Weston

OER Textbooks

Please Note: This book is chapter one of Victoria Weston's Introduction to East Asian Art in Three Journeys, which can be found in full at https://scholarworks.umb.edu/oer_textbooks/3/

For the remaining chapters, visit:

Guide Part 2: https://scholarworks.umb.edu/oer_textbooks/5/

Guide Part 3: https://scholarworks.umb.edu/oer_textbooks/6/

This book is an introduction to important art forms practiced in China, the Korean peninsula, and Japan. It is in no way an encyclopedic treatment of the art histories of East Asia. Rather, it is a textbook for a single semester course. Each section is devoted to one year in time and framed by historical factors that naturally encourage comparative analysis. …

Artistic Embodiment: The Role Of Art-Based Research In Communicating Disability Experiences, Juliana Scheopner

Theses/Capstones/Creative Projects

Visual art has immense potential to communicate complex experiences of disability. As a disabled artist, I am interested in how disability has been portrayed in artwork, particularly in how other disabled artists choose to represent their lived experiences. Through art-based research, this study explores how disabled artists have used portraiture to depict their disability. Selected art includes work from Frida Kahlo, Deborah Padfield, Persimmon Blackbridge, and the author. Following an analysis of literature, selected artworks, and salient disability scholarship, emergent themes were identified. The focus on the complexity of disability experiences demonstrated the importance of considering a wide range of …

City, Janina Butz

Theses and Dissertations

Janina Butz observes the improvised support structures holding New York City together at its edges. Looking at the found, cheap materials, spray painted, rusty, drilled, sawed, and haphazardly welded together on the sidewalk. The hard clashes of cheap material and expensive real estate lead Butz to draw a bigger picture of the fraud seams our society is tied together with.

Cannibalizing The American Dream: Memory, Materials, And Manifesting, Juan Hinojosa

Theses and Dissertations

Juan Hinojosa’s thesis explores collage and assemblage through discarded materials, pop culture, and personal history. He transforms found objects into layered works that reflect consumption, memory, and American identity. Moving between sculpture, painting, and installation, his practice examines excess, nostalgia, and the tension between what is consumed and what consumes him.

Science, Fiction, James Nick Peelor

Theses and Dissertations

Science, Fiction is about death, mental health, UFOs, and having a mutifaceted art practice rooted in a DIY ethos.

¿Cómo Anda La Chamba?/How’S Work?, Alexander Valdez Jr.

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

¿Cómo Anda La Chamba?/How’s Work? explores the conditions, experiences, and broadness of what labor is and how we see labor currently. Alexander draws on his lived work experiences to question how companies operate and to challenge the way workers are often undervalued and treated as disposable. Raised in a working-class family, Alexander’s view of labor was shaped not only by his lived experiences, but also his parents’. Each artwork communicates a different work environment and experience that he’s had. These places and interactions have influenced his work by making him question the definition of labor and how the working class …

Nasty, Mya L. Correa

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

I am exploring artwork about women’s power and sexuality, centering on hair. I’m interested in how hair carries history and how it has been used to control and frighten women. I’ve been reading feminist artists’ books and researching their findings alongside my own work. Drawing on my personal history, my mother’s story, and the experience of raising my daughters, I consider how my children’s lives differ from mine and my mother’s, and what those differences reveal.

Hair has long been wielded as a weapon to enforce expectations on women’s bodies by a society afraid of losing control. As creators of …

Desert Ghost, Jessica Downs

All Theses

This thesis explores the relationship between landscape, memory, and the body through handmade paper installations inspired by the deserts of southwestern Utah. Drawing from personal experience of place and the loss of a childhood home, the work considers how environments are internalized and persist as shifting, sensory impressions rather than fixed geographies. The desert becomes a generative site for examining presence, transformation, and the passage of time, both geologic and personal.

I use handmade paper and installation to translate my experience of place into physical form. Paper serves as both material and metaphor; its fibers, textures, and muted tones emulate …

Diagrammatic Contemplation, Khang Nguyen

The Transdisciplinary STEAM+ Journal

This work presents the integration of contemplative practice engaging western and eastern philosophies about apperception, consciousness, presence with an art practice that uses diagrammatic contemplation as a basis for developing and presenting art. The aim is not just an optical effect, but to engage the viewer in experiencing non-dual consciousness.

Introduction, Sean Ferrier-Watson, George Neal

Forces

No abstract provided.

Sparks Under Ashes, Ani Sargsyan

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

Rooted in hope, reflections on longing, family history, and the contemporary Armenian experience take precedence in Sparks Under Ashes. The title of the show itself derives from my great-grandfather’s notebook, which details his unjust exile during the Great Purge of the Soviet era and other life experiences. His handwriting becomes ingrained in my work as both our marks collide through painting, drawing, and transfer processes to bridge the time between us and celebrate generations of resilience.

Acts of endurance are crucial for Armenia’s survival because attempts of erasure have always been prominent, with the 1915 genocide being the darkest …

Spieltrieb, Edward F. Newcomb

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This thesis investigates the creative and pedagogical intersections of nostalgia, play, and neurodivergent experience through a mixed-media studio practice. Grounded in Friedrich Schiller’s concept of Spieltrieb—the human drive to play as a balance between sensual and rational impulses—this work explores how childhood memory, instinct, and impulsive mark making inform both artistic production and art education.

Drawing on theoretical frameworks by Susan Sontag and John Berger, the work resists overinterpretation in favor of sensory immediacy, inviting viewers into direct, embodied encounters with material form. Sontag’s critique of mimetic representation and Berger’s analysis of reproducibility and context inform a practice that …

2026 Forces

Forces

Full issue of Forces, published March 2026.

So There I Was, Jesse Marie Baggett

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

This written thesis provides a description and analysis of my thesis exhibition, So There I Was, which presents a body of ceramic sculptures and paintings that explore themes of adventure, travel, and shared experiences. The work reimagines personal experiences through a cast of animal characters, with a rabbit acting as a stand-in for myself. These narratives are inspired by events from my own life and are transformed into imaginative scenes that emphasize playfulness, wonder, and storytelling.

The sculptures combine toy-like animal figures, pull carts, and miniature architectural structures to create playful environments that resemble playsets or staged scenes where …

Mirroring Memory: Material, Reflection, And Becoming, Nila Mojaveri

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

ABSTRACT

This thesis explores how memory shapes identity through material, reflection, and tactile processes. Drawing from my personal experience of migration from Iran and the emotional distance from home, the work examines memory as a shifting, layered, and embodied phenomenon rather than a fixed narrative. Through the use of mirror, clay, fabric, and paint, I investigate how materials can hold, reflect, and transform lived experience. Each material carries specific meaning: mirrors introduce fragmentation and reflection, clay records touch and grounding, fabric evokes softness and domestic memory, and paint creates atmosphere through layering and tone. Together, these materials form a visual …

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.

Cuentos De Barro, Daniel Anthony Vasquez

Theses and Dissertations

Cuentos de Barros addresses the complexities of creating art and processing indigenous heritage and personal history as a Salvadoran immigrant within a neo-colonial society. Centering ritual, care, and healing, the artist imbues sculptures with tenderness using abstract forms and the tactile manipulation of unfired clay and graphite.

My Head Is This Animal, Paula De Martino

Theses and Dissertations

De Martino’s paper explores the dynamics of control in human interaction by discussing her relationship with animals. The author's life experiences serve to construct a narrative, but she lies. She becomes an unreliable narrator who aims to blur the threshold between art and real life throughout the performative gesture of appropriating identities. She steals from the ancient myth of Medusa through her stone sculptures (her offspring), in an egoistic attempt to excuse her fear and longing for motherhood.

Folds, Bayan Abukiwan

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis uses the fold as an orienting metaphor and material gesture to linger on the minor details of intimacy that are severed by occupation and political violence. Through painting, drawing and ceramics, the work traces the more implicit modes of dehumanization—particularly in relation to Palestine—while engaging the domestic as a site of quiet and complexity. Influenced by artists like Jennifer Packer and Beatriz González, the practice embraces slowness, touch, and opacity to fold the viewer into a haptic encounter with the work.

An Archeology Of Looking, Marco G. Dasilva

Theses and Dissertations

Marco DaSilva’s mosaics explore camouflage and syncretism, blending symbols from American culture, Catholic saints, Afro-Brazilian deities and queer spaces. His work examines objects as relics, where identity is hidden and revealed. By integrating simple materials and transforming them into unique compositions, DaSilva creates hybrid objects where all of his worlds intersect, crafting his own mythology.

Hemispheres Of Faith: Mapping The Global Journey Of An Ivory Rosary Bead At The Metropolitan Museum Of Art, Mary M. Thompson

Theses and Dissertations

Hemispheres of Faith reattributes a carved ivory rosary bead in the Metropolitan Museum of Art to the Quito School in 18th-century Ecuador. Through examining the trade history of the Manila Galleons, material analysis, and iconographic study, Hemispheres of Faith challenges the bead's European origins and reveals the object as a product of global exchange, devotional practice, and colonial artistic collaboration within the Spanish Empire.

A Limit That Recedes, Chloe Wilcox

Theses and Dissertations

In "A Limit that Recedes", I discuss my art practice in terms of accumulation and techniques of reproduction, such as casting, printing, and repetitive actions. I contextualize my work among artists such as H.C. Westermann, Isa Genzken, and Paul Thek. The work featured in this thesis explores ideas of aspiration, longing, and failure, and explores themes of the fraught relationship of the human and nature.