Senior Projects Spring 2024

It is difficult coming to terms with one’s sexuality when it does not fit the social heteronormative patterns so deeply ingrained in our culture. Heterosexuality is broadcast through media as the norm with storylines in film, television, and advertisements, and serves as the beacon for the expectations of western culture. With these subliminal messages being seen everywhere, homophobia and shame are harbored within queer individuals causing confusion and rejection of their sexuality. These internalized feelings lead LGBTQ+ individuals to conceal their authentic selves. My project explores this interplay between expectations, shame, and its profound impact on the bodies and lived experiences of queer individuals.

As a queer person, I find myself constantly aware of my differences, and of others’ perceptions of those differences. This includes censoring the way I interact or speak with others by tiptoeing around conversations on sexuality, a habit ingrained in me because of shame. My fear of people knowing my orientation and their judgement is the reason for my vigilance and for the façade I have acquired over time. Ironically, my queerness offers me hope. To think of a future where I can be with the person I love gives me a sense of empowerment as I can truly be myself. Those sentiments easily translate through my work with clay as I’m intimately able to form the sculpture through touch. My clay sculptures explore this juxtaposition of emotion through the texture and imagery within the abstracted figures. Wings symbolize the liberating hope of authenticity as they can soar freely; veins constrict the figure as shame holding a queer person back; and the ruffled shrubbery provides camouflage. 

I chose clay because of its overtly tactile nature. Sexuality and feelings of discomfort within the body can be translated through the way clay is manipulated. I sketched multiple iterations of my abstracted figures before reaching the final ideas, using different colored pens, highlighters, and post-it notes. I created various figurative elements out of earthenware and white low fire clay and constructed these sculptures using both the coil and slab building methods. For the surface, I brushed on white slip on several of the earthenware pieces and then carved through the slip for a rich sgraffito effect. After a slow and through drying process, the pieces are bisque fired to 1728° F in the electric kiln. Underglaze is then applied to create a painterly fleshy surface with the clear glaze used to highlight certain parts of the sculpture. Lastly, one or more glaze firings at 1888° F finishes the pieces. 

Interconnecting systems exist within us as veins, blood vessels, lungs, and nerves; beneath us as roots and mycelium; and above us as branches and dark matter. Cobwebs in forgotten corners, gluten networks in bread, lightning and the scars of its victims, tangled threads and hair, stretch marks, dendrite crystals, and neurons exemplify this pattern. A variation in the patterns is seen through the many forked pathways of rivers and the self-connecting fibrous network found in coconut husks. Despite the differences, we are surrounded and framed by these tangled lines. 

For my Senior Project, I wanted to showcase the various networks behind and inside almost everything we interact with. Many of these pathways are invisible, and the world is much bigger than our narrow perception of it. Growing up in Miami with a lush backyard made me interested in how the coconut husks that fell off the palm tree appeared woven, how roots are structured when ripped out of the ground after hurricanes, and how tree branches can mimic the patterns within us. The physical parallels captivated me just as much as the conceptual ones. I began thinking about how invisible networks, such as our personal connections to one another, can be framed similarly as a forked path featuring stronger or weaker trajectories. Each of our decisions and consequences mirror root-like systems. The closest many of us get to mapping out our connections to people is through a family tree, but my connections do not begin and end with blood. I chose to create an immersive environment with my site-specific installation through variations on the different kinds of pathways taken by nature.

A wide range of materials and methods were utilized to create this installation. Lightweight non-woven interlining fabric was soaked with a handmade fiber paste mixture. The webbing then was pulled apart and dried to create different concentrations of an interconnected network. Cheesecloth was treated in a similar fashion. A domestic sewing machine fitted with a darning presser foot was used for the embroidery. A water-soluble fabric was stretched with an embroidery hoop and patterns were drawn with the needle and thread. Different stitches and stitch lengths and widths were used to create a variety of textures and marks. The fabric was carefully submerged in lukewarm water and allowed to dissolve. For the paper pulp root networks, the fiber paste mixture was piped using syringes, plastic bags, squirt bottles, and anything that could extrude the mixture. Boxes were fabricated out of plywood and treated as separate segments within the larger installation. Pure plant fibers were collected from banana leaves, wheatgrass, and pruned vines by soaking overnight and boiling with soda ash.

Connection is at the core of the human experience. Human beings are inherently social creatures, constantly collecting spare parts from one another to mold ourselves into the person we are today. We are not special in this way; most living things share similar broad social behaviors such as aggression, territoriality and affection. Although these are commonalities between differing species, the intricacies of human relationships are arguably more vital to ensure our survival and wellbeing. The idea of hyper-individualism has been a topic of discourse on social media since the height of the Covid-19 pandemic. People have become obsessed with the concept of being tragically and completely unique, which is antagonistic to the idea of community and has begun to reframe the things we do for each other as acts of labor. There is something telling in the way we gravitate towards one another that is worth more than a single individual, or even the collective biology of our species. 

In an attempt to understand myself, I started examining the interpersonal relationships in my life which have impacted me the most. I began to understand that everything I am was written and rewritten by the people I have crossed paths with. The way I speak, the things I find funny, the way I stir my tea, even my distaste for back-up cameras are all things I have learned or borrowed from the relationships I’ve encountered. The ambiguity of the ceramic vessel allows me to explore these connections in a palpable way due to their non-objectiveness. While in the process of making these vessels, I wrote out their stories - how they looked, what they were about, and how each of them represented either a tangible relationship or an intangible aspect of one. 

I began each ceramic vessel on the potter’s wheel, throwing forms that could loosely resemble human anatomy. I then connected or altered them in various ways, opting to either mold them together or add supporting elements for stand-alone display. These vessels were created using the FGCU raku sculpture clay as well as commercially prepared clays (Standard 266 and Highwater’s Speckled Brownstone). They were then bisque fired at 1728° F, finished with a Mayco glaze and fired to a cone 5 (2160° F). The writing featured was stitched onto a series of monotype prints, which is a form of printmaking with no permanent matrix. These prints were made by rolling ink onto a plexiglass plate, creating texture using plastic and fabric, then transferred onto rice paper. Those prints were then torn down, stitched onto cardstock and displayed in varying ways.  

Memory is fluid, a stream of consciousness that is processed, stored, and relayed. The network of neurons and synapses that fire faster than we imagine are finite and dying along with us. Getting older is an aggressive adversary in our battle for control in both physical and mental capacity, limiting the amount of storage we can hold day to day. This fleeting nature encourages the inherent fragility of memory and its delicate grasp on our experiences. Just as any other precious object, memory is something we as a species depend on in life to keep ourselves moving. For my senior project, I wanted to acknowledge memory as an incomparable part of every individual. I believe my life is powered by my memory and every emotion and thought stems from my past whether the moment was recent or departed. 

I cannot recall the first memory I ever had but I know it dealt with death, causing a nervous disposition for my mortality to wash over me. With the passing of my father and grandfather when I was in middle school, I changed my philosophy on spending time with those I loved and cared about. I strived to make as many memories as possible and intentionally photographed everything. I realized I could not recall my mother’s face as soon as I turned around a corner, much less my father or grandfather, without looking at a picture. It was at that point when I first understood that I feared death a lot less than forgetting those who I cared about. My father and I took a trip to Alaska when I was younger with the promise and excitement to explore cultural connections in our family once I got older. Symbolic motifs of bears and salmon took root, despite an ironic coincidence of never spotting either animal while on the trip. Bears to me are powerful symbols of strength and loss while fish represent a harsh struggle to live. Bears rely on the salmon for a large part of their diet, a one-sided relationship of the cycle. Salmon specifically live to die within a few years, their bodies providing nutrients to the foliage as they beach along riverbeds. Like the fish, new growth will take place in my stead as my memory becomes the old growth, and hopefully my bear will finally be satiated. 

My wall-hanging fish and bear are created with the dark-toned #266 clay from the Standard Clay Company. The fish are formed from flattened slabs, rolled into tubes, and manipulated by hand to create dynamic heads and fins with slight alterations in the body’s shape to mimic movement in water. The surface is covered liberally with slips to introduce writing and images onto the fish. Once fired to temperatures ranging from 2016° F-2167° F a variety of browns on the naked clay contrast heavily with the added surface. The bear is sculpted from coils and slabs of #266 clay with a backing added as support to hang on the wall. Additional larger fish were created using a sculptural clay and the raku firing process. 

In ancient Greece, daimons were earlier considered to be lesser gods or spirits. They could be good or evil in nature, and may have been the souls of deceased humans. It is from the word daimon that we get the term demon: a concept with decidedly negative connotations. With the rise of Christianity and monotheism, there was no place for other beings worthy of worship. The daimons, along with other pagan divinities, were recast as false idols, tempting the unwary from worshiping the true God. Historically, Christian artists have depicted them as hideous beings torturing the souls of the damned in hell. Today, the word demon is used to refer to all manner of supernatural evil beings, but the Christian version reigns supreme in popular culture. Horned, tailed, and hooved, they are fallen angels battling God for the souls of mankind. The Devil is an archdemon, embodying sin.   

I am an atheist and a materialist. Sometimes I long for the imagery, community, and ritual that comes with spirituality. It is only practical, as an atheist, to make my own gods. In Diabolus, I have created a trinity of demon gods, imagined to be from an alternate version of this Earth: Vipera, Dominus, and Labyrinthos. Vipera is a creature of monstrous femininity. She breeds, births, loves, abandons, seduces, and devours for her own pleasure. Dominus is a demon for a capitalist age, trading power and wealth for men’s souls, whose lust for acquisition is insatiable. Labyrinthos represents mankind’s fear of the inevitability of death and the desperate search for greater meaning in an infinitely complex world. Though the three are from a hypothetical alternate world, the forces they represent are very present in this one. For my senior project, I chose to create a painted altarpiece triptych, accompanied by a set of printed cards.

The design of the triptych was developed using a combination of digital and traditional methods. To develop the images for the characters, sketches on paper were scanned, edited, and colored digitally in Clip Studio Paint. The paintings were photographed and edited digitally to test composition and color possibilities throughout the process. The triptych itself was painted with acrylics in a loose, gestural style to emphasize energy and movement. The frames around the panels were made by building up modeling paste, which was textured to create designs and reveal darker gold paint underneath. A brighter, lighter gold was brushed across its surface to exaggerate depth. The canvases were then hinged together. The cards were created with the same combination of digital and traditional methods. Each card has an illustration of a demon on the front with prayers and stories written on the back.

For most of my life I have been attracted to color and how we use it in our lives. When I was 10, I demanded that I be allowed to paint my bedroom solid black and throw bright colors on the walls. When I was 14, I started to experiment with hair color and dyed my hair bright purple and blue. As I got older, color remained important to me, enriching every part of my life and my thoughts on possible career paths. When I was 21, I was diagnosed with depression and anxiety, and learning how to navigate these mental disorders became a new challenge to face. To help get me through my new reality I turned color psychology, the study of how colors affect perceptions and behaviors, and my paintings helped me understand what was happening in my mind.

With a mental disorder, there exists good days and bad days. However, in between these days are what I like to call “even” days; they aren’t good or bad, they just are. Then there are the extremes, where one day you are far in the darkness, and everything is piling up and becomes too much. Then another day everything is light and airy, where you feel as though nothing could go wrong, and you are walking in the clouds. I explore these extremes in my project to show the viewer how they manifest in a visual format. While the painting titled Erdrücken (German; to overwhelm) is considered the “negative” of the two, it it more about the overwhelming feeling that life and these mental disorders can bring you. The painting titled Évitement (French; avoidance), the “positive” painting, is intended to depict the way we can ignore what is happening around us, the thought that “nothing could ever go wrong, life is perfect”, but that is not the truth. The size of these paintings is intended to take up your entire view as you experience how all-consuming these extremes can be.

For this project I created two 72” x 48” paintings using four 36” x 48” canvases, one for the “negative” extreme and one for the “positive” extreme. I began the composition with digital sketching in Procreate, mapping out each individual layer, while still being spontaneous and intuitive in the mark making. The canvases were primed and sanded for a smoother overall look, and I chose a specific color palette to emphasize my intentions. Using acrylic paint, I combined marks made with paint brushes, palette knives, and sponges in layers to give depth and space to the paintings.  

In simple terms, ‘instinct’ can be defined as an innate pattern of behavior in response to certain stimuli or a natural, intuitive way of acting or thinking. ‘Resilience’ can be defined as the capacity to quickly recover from and withstand difficulties. Resilience is not an adaptive trait that only some individuals carry within themselves; it is an inherent, instinctual ability to overcome hardships and is essential to one’s ability to survive and thrive in this world. I believe that it is this connection—that of instinct and resiliency—that connects humans to the natural world. Humans and animals have lived alongside each other for thousands of years, developing relationships that have ranged from predator-prey dynamics to loyal companionships. Due to this, it is only natural that humans and animals share many traits with each other which connect to resiliency, such as strength, loyalty, and adaptability.

Resilience has always been a trait with which I have identified myself. The ability to persevere through the difficulties that have come into my life while keeping a positive outlook has helped me get to where I am today. Just as important is my relationship with nature, which is a nurtured connection which has had a strong influence on my identity as a person and as an artist. For my senior project, I chose to combine animal symbolism with self-portraiture to emphasize resilience as an innate and instinctual trait and to find comfort in the fact that this trait is shared across many different species. The animal species rendered in my works in this series are a form of self-portraiture as well; I see myself in each of the animals that I have chosen, and their symbolism resonates strongly with the characteristics of my own personality. 

This project began with much trial and error. The first step was to choose four animal species that I wanted to focus my works on. I did a great amount of research on the symbolism, history, and traits of various species until I had narrowed my choices down to four: the snake, the hummingbird, the wolf, and the elephant. After this, I developed many plans and preliminary studies in order to seek out the specific essence that I was looking for in my compositions. Once I was happy with the compositions, I was able to move onto the final works, which I created using a repetitive process involving charcoal and gesso. For this process, I created textured layers on an initially flat surface by first laying down charcoal, then painting over the charcoal with gesso. I repeated these two steps several times, overlapping and fusing the media with one another until the desired images were achieved. These two simple materials can create darks, lights, and mid-tones, with the darkest darks achieved using solely charcoal, the lightest lights using solely gesso, and the mid-tones using a wide range of both. 

As children across the globe become proficient in holding and effectively utilizing a pencil, they also gain the ability to write, draw, and cut into the first material given to them by parents and teachers alike to convey their thoughts and imagination—paper. The origin of this material was conceived in 105 A.D. by Cai Lun, a Chinese Court Official during the Han dynasty which lasted from 206 B.C. to 220 A.D. One tradition that grew from this invention was called Jianzhi – “paper cuts”—and quickly became accessible to people of all classes. Some of the earliest paper cuts were found in the Northern and Southern Dynasties of China during 420-589 A.D., its art form growing significantly in the later Tang Dynasty. This practice, which has been done primarily by women, continued to be used for special occasions and celebrations to adorn one’s living quarters. The making of cut paper artworks has spread to other countries around the world where they create their own intricate forms, with traditions and techniques passed through each generation.

When I was still in elementary school, I visited my grandparents in Portugal over the summer. They had a vast vineyard with a forest nearby that called out to be explored. I often ventured into the forest, a small plastic bucket in hand for berry picking while my grandparents' old dog Rexi accompanied me down the dusty trail. While in the forest roaming down the worn path, I carefully picked blackberries, listening to the sounds of nature around me, imagining fauns and fairies popping out from behind trees to greet me. I want to keep that child-like wonder in how I view the world from my travels, incorporating this part of myself with my installation. For my Senior Project, I have used the medium of cut paper light boxes to create a moment in time when one’s mind can reconnect with their younger self, when the world seemed brighter and more whimsical, even otherworldly. This installation serves as a reminder to never forget the magic of the world for those with eyes to see it. 

My paper light boxes were constructed by sketching the design on paper at the scale that would fit inside a shadow box with designs originating from pictures taken during my travels to Portugal. When the design was finalized, it was lightly shaded inside every other area that would become a cut-out layer to differentiate them before transferring my outline onto 80 lb. white cardstock. To transfer my finalized drawing, a makeshift light box with a lamp underneath a glass table was used with the original drawing underneath and the cardstock paper on top to make the transfer. When the outlines were finished, each layer was cut with an X-acto knife over a PVC cutting mat. Once all five layers were cut out, thin strips of white foam core board were cut to fit within the back borders of each layer, using tacky glue to stick them on layer after layer. Afterward, the glued layers were placed down into the shadow box, followed by an RGB LED light strip placed around the back as the final assembly of the box. Through these illuminated scenes of fantasy, I hope you can experience the childlike wonder that was buried deep within so long ago.

The Vietnamese Lunar New Year, known as Tết, holds significant cultural and familial importance as a time of renewal and hope for the future, celebrated among family, ancestors, and friends. This cherished tradition, deeply rooted in Vietnam's history and identity, resonates both in the homeland and within Vietnamese communities worldwide. Central to Tết festivities are the twelve creatures of the Vietnamese Lunar Calendar, known as con giáp, including the rat, buffalo, tiger, cat, dragon, snake, horse, goat, monkey, rooster, dog, and pig, each symbolizing distinct personality traits and meanings. Originating over 2,000 years ago in East Asia, these zodiac animals have evolved in significance, finding a place in everyday life and culture, including in Western societies. Through my Senior Project, I aim to honor my Vietnamese heritage by creating representations of the Vietnamese Zodiac Animals, sharing the richness of my Asian culture with my peers and fostering cross-cultural understanding and appreciation within Western academic and artistic circles.

Born from here, in the United States, I adopted American culture and abandoned the traditional ways of life that my immigrant family wanted me to follow. As a first-generation immigrant daughter, I did not feel like I was “American” enough due to the complexion of my skin amongst my peers and I did not feel “Vietnamese” enough to understand my elders’ arduous upbringing. At home, at school, and in public, I did not understand what my identity was – I felt like an enigma in my place. My old insecurities about sharing my culture, my food, and my clothes unknowingly made me separate myself from feeling a connection with my environment. Now, those feelings are far. My art is the bridge for me to share and embrace my identity within the society I have surrounded myself with. I created sculptures based on the Tết zodiac animals and along with each animal, added an element of nature from both cultures I know – such as the orange blossom from Florida and the lotus from Vietnam. I hope this collection can bring others into another sense of place without having to go far and have them appreciate the familial bonds that they have in their lives. 

My artwork is a continued exploration of the zodiac animals I created during Ceramics Workshop in Spring 2023. These handheld symbolic animals inspired me to experiment with a larger scale and educated me on the importance of the creatures in my Vietnamese identity. They are made of porcelain and painted with underglaze. With my larger pieces, the primary mediums can be divided into three: a white low-fire clay body, paper-mâché, and air-dry clay. All three materials have the quality of being able to be easily manipulated and molded. For the pedestal and wall pieces, the process begins with a white low-fire clay body. Once fired at cone 04, 1945° F, the ceramic becomes the structure for my lightweight materials. For the delicate and thin plant matter, it is made with wire and air-dry clay, specifically, DAS Air Hardening Modeling Clay; and, once dry, airbrushed with acrylic paints. The ceiling sculptures are constructed solely from paper-mâché and lightweight materials. The armature of the ceiling sculptures is formed from recyclable materials, such as cardboard, paper, and tin foil. Every piece is finished and detailed with acrylic paint.

Self-portraits in any medium are all about understanding the subject. As an Asian American, I have analyzed the perspectives of Chinese self-portraiture, hoping to achieve a visual representation using personality traits. Learning through Chinese self-portraits challenged my identity and helped me to reflect on societal norms, values, and viewpoints. Self-portraiture is best conveyed through various expressions or emotions, as they capture the subject's true essence. Exploring the multifaceted context of self-identity requires a nuanced understanding of how Chinese identity is represented, including its strengths and weaknesses. I am exploring myself by recognizing the different representations of Chinese identity, such as the portrayal of China in the media, literature, and popular culture. This connection to heritage becomes a deliberate choice as it leads to inspiration from traditional aesthetics, embracing and celebrating the enduring visual language of self-representation. 

I always see myself as an Asian-American, with parents who were born in China and migrated to America. I like how I look and have been drawing self-portraits for years. The process of capturing my image on paper is both therapeutic and fulfilling. Using intricate linework and vivid colors to enhance the image, I incorporate traditional cultural artifacts or symbols into my self-portraits, such as Chinese fans, lanterns, and hairdresses. These symbols serve as visual anchors, connecting the viewer to a broader cultural heritage and conveying a sense of rootedness. I understand how my culture works by adding references from various images to depict and represent myself. Through my art, I can represent myself in a unique way that is true to my heritage. Exploring my cultural identity through self-portraits can help me view who I am growing up in an Asian household in America.

My creative process begins with gathering references from historical paintings and symbolic imagery to incorporate into my self-portraits. I lay down my ideas on paper using a regular pencil while considering composition and erasing any unnecessary marks before outlining with bolder marks. This helps me create a more defined and detailed portrait. I use soft pastels to create rich, intense colors that develop multiple layers on the paper's surface. Blending with pastels helps to achieve smooth color transitions, makes the figure stand out more and adds texture and better quality. I also incorporate symbolic imagery from Chinese culture to enhance the representation of myself through these portraits. I carefully select these symbols to ensure that they accurately represent me and my identity. By alternating various styles, I aim to capture the essence of Chinese traditions and convey a sense of identification and representation. 

Rats and pigeons are perceived as vermin, but they are actually quite smart and have a history of being domesticated by humans. For my Senior Project I focused on the positive attributes of these creatures and used their appearance to create friendly ceramic companions to brighten the mundane dinner experience. The pervasiveness of rats and their habit of living in the sewer has given humans the perception that rats are dirty animals. Their reputation was not helped by the spread of the black plague in the Middle Ages - which was actually transmitted by the flea, but the rat was to blame. In later centuries, however, “fancy rats”, a domesticated version of the black rat (ratus Ratus), was bred to perform in the circus and were kept as pets by the European nobility. Pigeons are often associated with cities and eating food waste off the ground. Despite the belief that they are a dumb nuisance, they are also very smart. They have the ability to know where they are and where they’re going, which is why they were used so effectively for delivering mail. 

For my senior project, I wanted to bring attention to our complex relationships with these animals by creating dinnerware in their image. I intend to become a production potter when I graduate, and I chose to take this opportunity to start my career. I knew from a young age that I wanted to be a professional artist, and to make a living selling my work. I have always loved going to craft fairs and for my project I was able to participate in a professional juried arts festival. It was very interesting to be on the other side of the booth selling my work. I was drawn to clay for my production line because of the texture and process of making something from just mud and an idea. I like to bring narrative into my work and create a story while crafting a particular piece. This led to the creation of a rat family that propelled me into developing my initial animal-based dinnerware set. 

The first thing that I had to do for this project was find an art fair where I could go to and sell my pots. There was the Bloomin’ Arts Festival in Bartow, Florida that I used to go to as a child, that aligned perfectly with this course. I applied to and was accepted into this juried show and developed a line of high fire cone 10 (2345° F) rat shaped cups. When I went to the fair, I knew I had to draw in a certain consumer because of my product. The fair was a great success. I sold a lot of cups, the most popular being the smaller size, and got a lot of positive responses from the people passing. I had great advice from the other venders and talked to people about potential positions within the ceramic field. This experience propelled me into the next stage of development: crafting midrange cone 5 (2167° F) pigeon shaped cups and bowls. I will not have access to a high fire kiln after I graduate so I wanted to develop a midrange product line as well. I hope that my rats and pigeons find a loving home and become a friend to dine with. 

To be a child is to be earnestly carefree and ignorant of the issues that many adults face in their day to day lives. When parents do not have the emotional, mental, or physical capacity to provide stability for their children, many familial duties become the children’s responsibility, resulting in “parentification”. Parentification happens when there is role reversal between parent and child for an extended period of time. Parentified children become emotional and instrumental caretakers for their parents and perceive themselves as pivotal in the family, making or breaking the peace. Children that experience parentification often struggle with a multitude of mental health issues such as anxiety, depression, and obsessive compulsive disorder. In this Senior Project, the images provide a representation of the inevitable impact of children bearing the burden of adult responsibilities. 

My parents divorced when I was very young, and they struggled through challenging psychological and life circumstances that resulted in my subsequent parentification. As I have gotten older, I have felt a desire to explore my childhood in order to break familial cycles of toxic communication, insecure attachment, and fear of abandonment. Coming to terms with the trauma, I choose to make art to understand, dissect, and process the complex emotions attached to my childhood. Photography, for me, has always been not just an escape from reality, but a professional aspiration and a medium through which I observe and experience life. The camera allows its patrons to become storytellers through how we choose to represent the reality around us. Pursuing self-portraits in photography has pushed me to explore techniques of photo manipulation, including creating composite images, in order to create an exaggerated reality driven by my emotions and personal interpretation of my experiences. 

In the creation of these final images, locations such as fields, apartments, and houses in South Florida reflected the memories stamped into my childhood. The Nikon D850 and Nikon Z6ii digital cameras used were paired with 28 mm lenses, then placed on tripods with self-timers several feet away from the scenes. I chose to crop to a 16:9 ratio for the hero images in order to reflect movie stills; movies were my first introduction into photography, and the impact of lighting, color and body language on audiences’ emotions. The images were lit with natural sunlight and artificial light from LED panels. Adobe Lightroom allowed me to exaggerate the ambient lighting to achieve an analogous color scheme of yellow, green, and blue. Adobe Photoshop was critical in the development of the composite images, which included multiple layers of similar photographs. For the installation, I supplied two View Masters, often played with by children, for the audience to experience an intimate view of the individual images that compose the final scenes.

“Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul, and sings the tune without the words, and never stops at all.”   -Emily Dickinson

Whether I like them or not, I am made up of the shaping experiences that surface from abrupt shifts in life. For my Senior Project, I chose to utilize animal imagery to symbolize these events and provide a unique self-portrait with a deeper connection to the natural world. Birds and bugs, some of the winged creatures of the planet, embody a strength and perseverance that I find within myself. Their voices are a consistent whisper reminding me of hope, confidence, and purpose in this lifetime. The concept of natural metamorphosis within nature offers a mirror to the shaping experiences of human life as we adapt and grow from the past self to the present. Personal growth from these shifts is an unwinding path of challenges and triumphs that are equally important in making us who we are.

For this project I knew that I would be painting, a calming medium for me that was prominent in my grandmother’s life and now in mine. I chose to create my works in the tondo form, round canvases rooted in the Italian Renaissance. My tondo forms represent three lenses into life that all humans endure: grief, movement, and passion. The dragonflies are symbolic of the loss of my grandparents, an overwhelming, lasting grief that is never linear and is represented through the cloudy film of the dragonfly’s wing. My movement from Michigan to Florida is represented by a native presence, the sandhill crane, embodying my growth into young adulthood, breaking through to a more authentic sense of self with fierceness, confidence, and an embrace of peace. As my future approaches with the passion of art for youth and community, beetles represent the vibrancy and strength that I plan to discover within myself and the impact I can create with others. Throughout these compositions are the flowing strands of my hair adapting to the environment in which they are placed. The changing of colors or abundance of hairs represents another level of personal connection within these shaping experiences.

My process consisted of familiarizing myself with my subjects, working to develop an understanding of natural metamorphosis through these animals’ experiences. I raised a family of butterflies and unexpectedly learned about my own personal metamorphosis. The way they carried pieces of their past selves into their full adult form was important to witness within my process to further my connection to the chosen animals. Along with this self-discovery, I created numerous 8-inch multimedia drawings of my forms in different compositions, experimenting with how I saw myself within these symbolic self-portraits. Once I created a layout that I was confident with for each tondo, I rendered them in full scale on paper with mixed media to prepare for the final works. I then utilized Tondo canvases (20-inch and 36-inch) for my final pieces with acrylic paint to capture my experiences within these images. I added painted hair components as a finishing touch of myself in the piece.