Sculpture Commons^™

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 …

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 …

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 …

Hard Edge Expansion, Quinderrious Humphrey

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

Hard-edge painting has always been rooted in precision, crisp forms, and the rejection of gestural abstraction. My work builds on this tradition while pushing its boundaries, breaking free from the conventional picture plane, exploring objecthood, and activating space through material and color. By using shaped wood substrates instead of canvas, I transform paintings into physical objects that interact with their environment rather than existing as flat images. The natural grain of the wood plays an integral role in this, creating an organic contrast to the controlled, geometric forms I apply.

Color functions as both a formal and perceptual tool in …

Theopoetics Prothesis: An Exploration In Faith And Form, Elise Aleman, Elise Aleman

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

My work is rooted in the biblical definition of faith: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen” (Hebrews 11:1). Like the Bible’s layered complexity—its patterns, metaphors, and cultural references—faith is not merely intellectual but an active trust in what is unseen. It transcends knowledge, anchoring itself in conviction and hope. This intersection of theology and lived experience is at the core of my practice.

Theopoetics—a framework that fuses theology and artistic expression—shapes my approach, allowing faith to be embodied through form rather than merely explained. Two seemingly distinct bodies of work—one centered …

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.

Expanses, Austin J. Buchanan

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This document will explain the nature of Austin Buchanan. This will go over the ideas, process, the executions, and the theories of my artwork. Explaining the ideas of space within, on, and around (outside), the picture plane.

The work included focuses on how a manipulated 2D surface evokes an experiential reaction. This manipulation enhances the actual experiences of real space that happens once someone becomes an observer of a 2D artwork and the conceptual idea of window space. This work challenges the ideas of the traditional picture plane illusion and the Flatbed surface or “Flatness” by expanding the picture plane …

Culture For Sale, Jessica L. Cartwright

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

In a post-colonial world, one would expect much of the servitude of the past to have ended, but this is not the case. In places such as the Bahamas new forms of or neo- colonialism has come to exist specifically under the guise of tourism. Writing amidst the end of colonialism in the twentieth century, Franz Fanon argues that sblack person exists in a liminal state. They must assimilate to the white society in order to be accepted, but not so much so thatbecause that it threatens whiteness. It is through Fanon’s writing on race that I have developed a …

Perplexions: Perceptions, Plexi And Prose, Amy B. Nelson

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

An understanding of our world is unique to each individual and their experiences. While experiences are often shared, we all process them according to our own schema. Through exploration into the multiple facets of plexiglass, my work examines trauma, loss and its lasting effect on a person's memory of the past, present and perception of the future. These experiences can cause an abrupt shift in personal schema and reshape one’s perception of the world. Through the combination of visual and linguistic stimuli, my trauma-informed work can be a catalyst for my viewers to discuss what they are experiencing and why. …

Ex-Tensions: Material Entanglement And Intensities, Zohreh Galdizadeh Garmeh

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This thesis is an exploration of the intrinsic capacity of matter and material formations and utilization of art as a mode of inquiry. Ex-tensions: Material Entanglement and Intensities investigates the animism and vibrancy of objects and the hidden interplay between materials and intensities that flow through and around within the spaces that confine us. In this body of work, all forms of material configurations are understood as animated and agential and as different representations of the same substance that are only formally diverse.

Visual Feast, Makaili J. Taylor

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This body of work, Visual Feast, explores the infatuation we have with sweets. Throughout my thesis, I discuss how this universal shared experience contributes to the art world, explaining how our culture today has turned a simple requirement to survive into a source of entertainment. I use my work to show the absurdity of our desires to overindulge, and the ways we fetishize food. By creating a visual feast for the viewers, my goal is to challenge perceptions of what is acceptable and what is absurd.

Neo_Fluxus & Dragons, Zachary A. Kelley

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

What is a viewer? Who can be a viewer? What is the purpose of a viewer? Is viewing an artwork a process? How does a viewer interact with an artwork? What is an artist? Are the formal elements or conceptual natures more important in art making? Why is that art? These questions and more direct me in how and why I make my art.

I will be discussing the relationship between the viewer and the artwork in an artwork experience. I will define an artwork experience using an analysis of Michael Fried’s notion of theatricality, relating the viewer to the …

Irrational Aggregates, Courtney N. Ryan

College of Graduate Studies: Theses & Dissertations

This thesis paper examines the work included in my Master of Fine Arts thesis exhibition entitled Irrational Aggregates. The goal of this work is to facilitate a dialogue between our natural environment and the excessive consumer-based environments in which we live. Combining a variety of ceramic techniques including hand building, wheel throwing, and casting these sculptures appear to be grown from, and even taken over by nature itself.

Often drawing inspiration from my personal narrative, that of consistent upheaval, relocation, and adjustment to new places, my work can appear both grounded and in a state of motion. I believe …