Undergraduate Thesis Work

The capstone two-semester course of my undergraduate Studio Arts degree at Virginia Tech was my “Senior Studio” class where I created a cohesive body of work and then displayed it in a senior art show.

My goal for this body of work was to explore the way text shapes art. My two practices of writing and visual art are closely related to me and I began to wonder why I was drawn to visual art if I could just write out how I felt. I started to explore how text works as a visual element instead of a way to communicate. My conclusion was that visual art appeals outside of the written word because it conveys emotion in a universal way that text cannot.

All of my pieces for this exhibit worked with text. Some of the larger gold and acrylic pieces have text mixed in with the organic pattern (see if you can decipher any of the words) while the swivels and scribbled graphite lines in other pieces are actually from an algorithm I created to rewrite text that was too personal to share. As part of this process, I explored the form of paper and how it impacted a work of art.

Please take a look at the photos from my exhibition. I recommend clicking on them to enlarge and scroll through the slideshow.