Date of Award
Spring 5-8-2024
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA) in Visual Art
Degree Type
Restricted Thesis
Abstract
This text is a tangle as much as it is a trajectory—of a mother (me), of materials and matter, and of processes of making and becoming. It is a very long and also very short story about the genesis of my artistic practice and my material wanderings across fiber, sculpture, drawing, painting, and installation. I move freely across these materials and disciplines, and insatiable curiosity is my guide.
I use humble materials and provisional strategies to explore themes of fragility and resilience. Forms intersect and balance, are tethered and in tension, and are tangled, wrapped, and bound.
In this curated disparity, I foster beauty and curiosity, inclusivity and harmony. In my sculptures and installations, the overlooked and discarded find a home.
Materials help me make connections to the world around me. As I conduct research relative to my artistic practice, I weave across, together, and through anthropology, philosophy, material science, quantum physics, neuroscience, biology, and ecology. Expanding my understanding of being (in the world) and making (as an artist) helps me understand my place in the world I inhabit. These discoveries flow through me in the same way energy moves between me and my materials as I make work.
I elevate the mundane and discarded to offer beauty, even absurdity, through efficient and restrained gestures. The resulting works may be provisional and ephemeral and even risk being overlooked. I want to engage the viewer in the process of wondering, questioning, and slow-looking. With a delicate sleight of hand, I make a 25-foot beam a whisper and a piece of dangling thread the star of a backstage show. Each material gesture aims to lull the distracted mind and lift the human spirit.
I work with found objects and am in awe of my own entanglement with material systems and accumulations. Things have a magnetic pull. I draw on political theorist Jane Bennett, who uses the terms ‘vibrant matter’ and ‘thing power’ in my discussion of the agency of objects. Things taunt me and activate my studio practice.
I also reference anthropologist Tim Ingold and his writing on making, which is informed by sensing, touch, and repetitive movements. These processes build bodily knowledge while simultaneously lulling and satisfying obsession and compulsion. Ingold also writes about the line that is integral to my work, whether weaving, writing, painting, drawing, walking, or working in architecture or installation.
Because I privileged expansion over iteration in this slice of academic time, the reader will experience the breadth of my exploration through connections to artists that span and elude movements: they are conceptual, minimalists, abstract expressionists, post-minimalists, contemporary (as in current) and taunt boundaries between art and craft. Those no longer living feel oddly contemporary as they are survived by my recent encounters with their ever-present work. Artists include but are not limited to: Michael Asher, Tamara Johnson, Mary Mattingly, Richard Tuttle, Cecilia Vicuña, and B. Wurtz. Phyllida Barlow, Shiela Hicks, Cy Twombly, Sol LeWitt, and Eva Hesse could be on this list, but as a sculptor and middle-aged mom, I don’t know where it all goes (in reference to material, the work, the pages, and last-but-not-least time).
Language
English
Program Chair
Lisa Bulawsky
Thesis Text Advisor
Jose deVera
Thesis Text Advisor
Meghan Kirkwood, PhD
Faculty Mentor
Jack Risley
Committee Member
Jose deVera
Committee Member
Amy Hauft
Committee Member
Amy Hauft
Recommended Citation
Smith, Lynne, "Materials are my Conduits" (2024). MFA in Visual Art. 21.
https://openscholarship.wustl.edu/mfa_visual_art/21
Artist's Statement
I use humble materials and provisional strategies to explore themes of fragility and resilience. Forms intersect and balance, are tethered and in tension, and are tangled, wrapped, and bound.
In this curated disparity, I foster beauty and curiosity, inclusivity and harmony. In my sculptures and installations, the overlooked and discarded find a home.
My work is fueled by obsession, impulse, and empathy. As I pick up the pieces around me, I delight in their eccentricity and varied states of entropy. I facilitate intimate correspondences between these material bodies. The resulting works may be permanent, ephemeral, or on the verge of coming completely undone.
I elevate the mundane and discarded through improvisational, economical, and restrained gestures. By choosing to withhold, I create generous space — for intimacy, connection, and possibility. With a delicate touch, an occasional sleight of hand, and an open heart, I make a woven cloth a material echo, a 25-foot beam a whisper, and a dangling thread the star of a backstage show. I use my eclectic ecosystem of materials in tandem with the specificities of sites to create visual poetry and paradox that engages viewers in slow looking. I hope to draw the viewer closer — to each other and to my work — and lift the human spirit.