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THESIS PRES. SCRIPT :)

The beginnings of this project started with a piece I completed last semester, which was a set of four ceramic monsters all meant to serve as visual metaphors …or metonyms…to describe instances where I found joy and pleasure in being un-identifiable and giving up on trying to define exactly who and what I was. It was a way to talk about queerness the way I experience it, as an ever-changing, difficult to articulate process of embodiment and being embodied.

For me, monsters are a device I have been compulsively using for the last few years to describe the aspects of identity and being in a body that are otherwise ineffable.

Donna Caraways Cyborg Manifesto and the cyborg theory was my jumping off point for this particular work, because I was intrigued by this social theory that there is such a thing that is both an identity and a lens to talk about identity.

Essentially Haraway is making a claim that the boundaries between human/animal/machine are blurred and we are all living as individualized, self curated amalgamations of parts.… which she calls cyborgs…She also talks a lot about coalition politics,

this idea of communities and groups that are not defined by shared characteristics necessarily but shared ideals and affinities

. I was inspired by this idea of a world full of creatures that are bonded through love and understanding, and are all different and strange, disparate but connected.

I wanted to talk about these ambiguous aspects of being by combining pictures space and 3D space with varying degrees of tangibility and “realness”.

The smaller figures are ceramic, and I also have the felted dog monster and the unfinished large humanoid that’s made out of tinfoil and paperclay.

I am a terrible planner so a lot of the visuals were worked out as I went. The gouache and graphite you see is all the top layer of a thousand

My natural instincts are always to combine bright colors and weird textures and I am drawn to a certain amount of busyness and I wanted to defend this compulsion towards excess through lofty imagery, evoking spirituality and alter-like compositions, arches and god-like creatures that supervise the scene.

I struggled for most of the semester to understand what the work was really about and I was trying to push it to be a more literal interpretation of my source material but it really is about vulnerability, love

and care and connectedness, expressed through the only way that I have experiences embodiment which is really through self-indulgent silliness.  

I feel like my research process aids me as much as it holds me back because I can get caught up in the academic portion and treat the work like a research paper where everything is a sterilized version of the sort of emotional and sappy stuff I think I really want to start being able to talk about in my work and I can cite all my sources and defend every decision through fact and theory.

The working title references these ideas of love and coalition, coming together as separate units but also outside of my thesis I have been working with my journals, making passages into comics, and I think this work is an extension of that exploration and I wanted to tie it all together.

These are examples of the work that was informed by and informed the project as I was working through it.

****Thank you both for all of your guidance and support. I am so grateful to have been encouraged so hard to do what I wanted to do and listen to my gut. Have a great winter break Bob and Maelle :)

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It’s alive!! Ish. I’ve been covering this baby in paper clay all day but i ran out and will finish the job tomorrow

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okay so like, extreme crisis of faith going on over in my bushwick apartment. I got a lot of feedback on Friday that was like “this is nice but it doesn’t really make any visual sense”. To everyone I talked to, the paper structures and the ceramics figures don’t work together at all because of painting styles, the geometric silhouette doesn’t work with the shapes of the monsters, looks like two different pieces, etc etc.

First I took it pretty hard because I am dramatic, but I pulled myself together and am doing some reworks that I’m actually feeling really excited about. I’ve purchased some paper clay to cover up this gigantic tin foil/plastic bag monster I made that hopefully changes the composition and I’m also adding paper clay to the edges of the box to make them less harsh, and I’m going felt some large structures. Please cross your fingers for me and the future of my ego

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moving onto painting stuff. Going to build a podium around 3.5 tall and as wide as this organization to display the work on - with paintings of people “holding up” the work on all four sides. Like most ideas this one is really clear in my head but I haven’t sketched it yet - will update blog with a picture ASAP

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Progress! I’m using hot glue! I have wounded myself mortally many times. My very handsome lizard is keeping me company through this journey. I think the figure on the floor, because of balance issues and that he isnmy favorite one, is going to stay on the floor and not on any paper structure.

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My last post was an accident but isn’t that such a funny picture! Anyways. Slowly chugging along here, building sets and planning the decor. This embroidery is going to go underneath the monster and the tree part will come up around the dome of the little rounded hallway bit if you can see in the drawing.

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Progress feat. Loaf of bread my mother baked

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Messing around with structure

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some painting experiments on this little guy whos had some leg accidents.