Buried/Encased/Embedded
Date
2021-05
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Abstract
Traumatic events and hereditary elements play a role in how our identity and body take shape but, are these factors also inescapable: is our parents' history a prophecy of what will also limit us? I am interested in how the economic and societal conditions of previous generations impact both the living and those yet to be born. Through my artistic practice, I confront the difficulties within my own experience in an attempt to find softness and empathy in a family that copes with mental illness. My work brings attention to damaging cycles that come from attempting to ignore or bury trauma.
Domestic space and the unseen body allow me to address our most difficult interpersonal relationships. Through my performance work, the body becomes a vessel that endures the traumas, both experienced and inherited, through labor. In other cases, the body is absent from a domestic setting, but the trace implies that we hold space for those who have passed in our lives, for better or worse. My artistic practice is focused around creating experiences that evoke this type of emotional complexity that I have experienced, allowing space and time for the viewer to critically consider their own relationships. Through the use of space, materiality, and body, I transform these habitual ways of dealing with trauma into moments of reflection that can lead to empathy, inherently beginning a new cycle of healing.
Description
Thesis completed in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Master of Fine Arts degree in the School of Art and Design at the New York State College of Ceramics at Alfred University, Alfred, NY.
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Thesis
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Keywords
MFA thesis, Fusing, Generational Trauma, Mental Illness, Sculpture and Dimensional Studies