Date of Award

Spring 5-14-2026

Author's School

Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts

Author's Department

Graduate School of Art

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Visual Art

Degree Type

Thesis

Abstract

Abstract Care as Method: Sound, Duration, and Multispecies Relation in Contemporary Art Practice

This thesis proposes care as a method of artmaking, not a subject, theme, or aesthetic position, but the actual structural logic through which a body of work is built, sustained, and understood. Working at the intersection of ecological art practice and relational aesthetics, it asks what happens when the encounter at the center of the work is not between two people but between species, infrastructures, and histories of use and what obligations that encounter generates.

The argument is developed through six interconnected works: installations, sound compositions, sculptures, and participatory systems, each centered around the pigeon as a figure encapsulating issues of proximity, instrumentalization, and exclusion that transcend the animal itself. The pigeon is not employed here as a symbol or spectacle. It appears as a neighbor, collaborator, and critical figure, an entity whose extensive entanglement with human infrastructure reveals the conditions under which care is extended, withheld, and weaponized. What the pigeon renders legible is approached with earnestness by the work.

Each artwork engages materials that carry prior histories of harm or neglect: anti-roosting spikes bound in gold wire, salvaged payphones, de-circulated library books, electromagnetic field recordings, and cast cement. The practice redirects them away from neutralizing what they have done and toward asking what else they might be capable of. Why Were You Not Here constructs a bird-scale gallery installation, turning its interior image inward toward the animal rather than outward toward the viewer. The Noise We Don't Hear makes audible the electromagnetic frequencies moving through a city's infrastructure and everyone living in it. Things Desired sustains a durational loft practice reading aloud to pigeons over many months and brings that practice, and a live bird, into the gallery. Vibrations of Care rolls de-circulated library books into hand-made beads, suspending discarded knowledge in a new form. The Pigeon Bureau installs a salvaged payphone at the Kemper Museum of Art, connecting it to a live hotline through which callers participate in an ongoing archive of redirected attention. Spike Vessels, after Ruth Asawa, drapes anti-roosting spikes bound in gold wire over cast cement forms, holding the infrastructure of exclusion without pretending the damage was never done.

Duration is central throughout, not as a formal strategy but as an ethical commitment, a refusal to resolve too quickly what deserves sustained attention. Care, as this thesis practices it, is built through repetition, through return, through a willingness to be altered by what one finds.

Drawing on Joan Tronto's political frameworks for care ethics, Donna Haraway's concept of becoming-with, Anna Tsing's account of multispecies entanglement, Nina Sun Eidsheim's relational theory of sound and listening, and Karen Barad's insistence on the constitutive force of material encounter, this thesis argues that care as method will change what is made and change the maker in the process. It extends relational aesthetics beyond the human, proposing a multispecies relational aesthetics art whose medium is not the object but the interspecies encounter, and whose measure of success is not resolution but genuine relation.

The deepest claim of this work is not that care is important, nor simply that art can practice it. It is that genuine attentiveness sustained, embodied, and open to being altered by what it finds that constitutes a distinct and necessary form of artistic knowledge, one that the field of ecological and relational art practice is only beginning to fully theorize.

Language

English

Program Chair

Tiffany Calvert

Thesis Text Advisor

Patricia Olynyk

Thesis Text Advisor

Meghan Kirkwood

Faculty Mentor

Patricia Olynyk

Committee Member

Patricia Olynyk

Committee Member

Monika Weiss

Committee Member

Ila Sheren

Artist's Statement

Violet L. White's practice is built around care as a method, not a subject, not an aesthetic, but the actual structural logic through which work gets made and sustained. The question is not what care looks like. It is what care demands.

Interspecies connection is central to this work, thoes who have lived inside human infrastructure for ten thousand years, and what that proximity has produced is a record of exactly how and when care gets extended, withheld, or turned into its opposite. I take that record seriously.

Her work with materials that carry prior histories of harm: anti-roosting spikes, salvaged payphones, de-circulated library books, electromagnetic field recordings, and cast cement. The practice doesn't try to neutralize what these materials have done. It asks what else they might be capable of. Spikes bound in gold wire hold the infrastructure of exclusion without pretending the damage was never done. A payphone becomes a live archive of redirected attention. Books marked as no longer worth keeping are rolled into handmade beads, suspended, and discarded knowledge held in a new form.

Duration runs through everything, not as a formal strategy but as an ethical commitment. These are not performances of care. They are its execution repetitive, slow, and genuinely open to being changed by what is found.

Her work proposes a multispecies relational aesthetics: art whose medium is not the object but the interspecies encounter, whose measure of success is not resolution but genuine relation. The deepest claim is not that care matters, or even that art can practice it, but that sustained, embodied attentiveness constitutes a distinct form of knowledge.

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