Term of Award

Fall 2009

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts (M.F.A.)

Document Type and Release Option

Thesis (open access)

Copyright Statement / License for Reuse

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

Department

Department of Art

Committee Chair

Marc Moulton

Committee Member 1

Bruce Little

Committee Member 2

Julie McGuire

Committee Member 3

Gary Dartt

Abstract

Author's abstract: Seeds of Passage is an exhibition of sculptural ensembles I have created with found-objects, musing the Nobel Prize winning play, Death and the Horsemen, by Wole Soyinka. The play is based on the incident that took place in 1946 in the western region of Nigeria, when the cosmological traditions of a colonizing power clashed with those of the indigenous culture. I use found (repurposed) objects to create many of my works. Three primary concepts guide my work: 1) latent energy - the memory or accumulative consciousness of the object, 2) the Sieving Process - the selection of individual parts from the local cache of materials, and 3) the pervasiveness of the material. Influenced by objects found in my late mother's collection in 1993, I have designed sculptural forms to bubble in latent energy and to emphasize subject area relationships between theatre and the visual arts; used found-object in exploring the cycle-of-objects; objects-to geographic location-to social class-to sculptural form-to collective object, and the wooden palette-plinths symbolize the cyclic nature of the found-object. Gestured forms in each subject pose of the collection are designed to be as telling as to objects for aesthetic pleasure and more importantly of educational resource for viewers. I argue that found-objects are repurposed materials and thus are essential elements of organization of my sculptural form.

OCLC Number

660028953

Research Data and Supplementary Material

No

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