THESIS: Tiny Mythologies


" T I N Y MY T HO L O GI E S "

S E N I O R T H E S I S S H O W ! ! !


My thesis is a load of color laundry done on cold, and somewhere along in the cycle the colors somehow bled into each other because I accidentally left a paint marker in the pocket of my jeans. 


“The less we know about it the better, we’ll make it up as we go along.” One of my favorite songs of this year by the Talking Heads, This Must Be The Place sums up what I have learned about life so far. It really stuck with me as I began drowning in work I didn’t even know I could drown in: No, Eva is not miserable, but maybe my alter-ego Walter is so Eva doesn’t have to be. Through selected memories of my childhood spent as a youngest sister to how I carry myself now, these “tiny mythologies” are stories I tell myself to make sense of the bigger picture and my place in the world. As I start to become my own person in the world instead of the aforementioned youngest sister, a projected alter-ego, a student in a studio art class, and become myself, I will still carry the weight of what I have learned. Out of all my work done at Peddie, in sketchbooks, with other people, existing by myself in a sonorous bubble, this thesis finally feels like I’ve answered what I have been asking myself for as long as I have been able to hold a pencil in my hand.


This term was the hardest term for me in Studio Art. However, I can proudly say I know I made it through. I discovered a lot of new ways to think and process art making and it proved difficult to see it all the way through at some points in the term. I am proud of myself for pushing myself because it would have felt like a disrespect to myself not to. As for pushing my artistic boundaries, making the masks felt like a push. The piece was something huge and abstract, two words I am afraid of. I have also never really sculpted faces before and I think in the beginning I felt inclined to be really stylized and treat the mask like I was still just drawing on a piece of paper. Harder still was making something that felt like my own AND sculpting with anatomy in mind.  I reached out for feedback and I’m happy with the way I transformed the masks. 

My thesis 6 felt like a big scary experiment. It was something that I had been wanting to do but didn’t feel like I could, until I saw it all come together. I was so afraid to make something un “body” like and I’m really happy with how I installed the piece in the end as a circle rather than two separate bodies. It felt cohesive to me and honoring the intent of the piece. Honestly, my pacing was all over the place this term. I had a lot of baggage that laid down the foundations for what I had to start building. I have learned to not give up. Despite some setbacks, I believe I really took initiative not only because it felt important to me, but I had a sort of wake up call. I never stopped at the piece being “done,” and that felt like something entirely new and a testimony to my growth as an artist this year.



 





thesis video here.


https://youtu.be/v0gpJrLsHyU

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