MFA THESIS
THE LAST ROSE OF SUMMER
This exhibition is a portrait constructed from a collection of things, images, and sculptures. These works examine the relationship between the home I grew up in, the land it resides on, and the body—a relationship profoundly shaped by my experience with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome and contoured by the medical experiences of my mother moving through her diagnosis with HER2-metastatic breast cancer.
The house and land endure despite their flaws, and my body persists through its own complexities. Sculptural forms anchor the connections between the house, the land, and the body; flexed between their shared scale and reflected qualities. The works physically manifest this interplay and hold these tensions together in tangible form.
Neglect, silence, anger, and compassion circle within the private ecosystem of my family. These forces—creative, destructive, passive, neglectful, stagnant, and silent—continue to shape my evolving relationships with my mother and father. I amplify these complexities into distilled tangible objects and sculptures.
I reconstruct, gather, and express these composed moments as a narrative that speaks to the shared experiences and complicated dynamics of a family navigating the healthcare system. Through the transformation of industrial materials, I explore the oblique angles of the organic and the synthetic, the stable and the fragile, the functional and the dysfunctional. With my reconstructive sensibility, I deepen the connective tissues that allow this fractured narrative to take form.
MFA QUALIFIER
SHEDSKIN
I experience myself every day: the skin on my body; the joints of my fingers grinding together when I crack them; the stiffness of my fused spine tearing on the muscles and scar tissue surrounding my vertebrae. I find it impossible for others to empathize with the physical sensations in my body. In this exhibition, I reconstruct the element of the body most impactful to the human experience: the skin. Through skin, we experience our worlds; fibrous tissues that compose our bodies record memory and trauma. We each shape our own worlds through the physical sensations we experience. “In a normal functioning body, skin separates the visible world from the hidden inside world.” ¹ I invert this idea by performing gestures with glass and home construction materials to create an intimate experience of my dysfunctional body.
My home is a product of my mother’s creative force, my father’s destructive force, and my own dysfunctional body. These contrasting influences from my parental figures shape the creative philosophies shown in this exhibition. Materials that inhabit spaces in the structure of the home are hidden in plain sight and often forgotten. I feel the home, rather than build one. I build and destroy and rebuild from the rubble. I transform materials through their destruction and recontextualize them. I become both forces in which I was raised.
My material investigations use pink fiberglass insulation, networked borosilicate glass, and neon. Networked structures of borosilicate glass exhibit the connective tissue structures present throughout the body. This structure holds the body to itself. Pink fiberglass insulation simultaneously repulses and seduces. The allure of the pink and fluffy material calls forth a craving for the physical body. Skin is like memory, pliable and robust. It is what holds us together and allows us to inhabit the world without the pain and suffering we would endure with our nerves, bones and vital tissues exposed to the universe. This exhibition is a reflection of the layered framework of the home to expose flaws in my dysfunctional skin and body.
