Date of Award

Summer 8-15-2025

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

I pay attention to the overlooked spaces where land and industry meet, prompting me to wonder what can be gleaned in the oily and cracked urban periphery. With a focus on my hometown St. Louis, this industrial city is my subject matter. And so, I draw in a neighborhood bisected by a highway. I animate with sand near the river confluence on land preserved after a historic flood. I make my own bricks in this Brick City, setting up in locations of former terra cotta clay mines. I sit in the tension of what author Michael Martone calls the “midwestern paradox,” in which “I [feel], simultaneously, my isolation on one of the margins of the world and my connection to what is essential in the scheme of all things.”

In this paper, I use four recent artworks to describe my relationship with drawing, time, and site. I expand my methods for image-making by using sand, clay, and metal as drawing materials. Committed to working observationally, I use drawing to slow down and observe what would normally flash through my car window. I work on site to be in collaboration with the landscape and meet passersby who share their stories. I emphasize time’s relationship to the industrialized landscape by inefficiently rebuilding common forms, producing sequenced analog works and making display systems which suggest movement. By emphasizing time in the work, I ask what is lost when efficiency is prioritized.

Language

English

Program Chair

Tiffany Calvert

Thesis Text Advisor

Cheryl Wassenaar

Thesis Text Advisor

Monika Weiss

Faculty Mentor

Cheryl Wassenaar

Committee Member

Sage Dawson

Committee Member

Amy Hauft

Committee Member

Lynn Peemoeller

Committee Member

Anika Todd, Cheryl Wassenaar

Artist's Statement

I use my projects to deepen my understanding of the landscape shaped by infrastructure. With a focus on my hometown, St. Louis, I begin with the intimacy and directness of observational graphite drawings. I bring my studio into locations which flash quicky past the car window. I notice the small details within these spaces: the way signs attach to poles, the way fences open and close, and the weedy vine creeping its way up a telephone line. Drawing on site leads me to other methods of tactile observation, such as clay reliefs in response to historic memory and difficult-to-control sand animation in response to the difficult-to-control river. Using steel, wood, and paper made from plants, I inefficiently rebuild common forms like electric line stakes, tensioning buckles, and hinges because I want to assert evidence of my unsteady hand in defiance of the efficiency and sameness imposed upon my surroundings.

While working in the peripheries of urban space, I have found plant life springing up from the concrete and cars, suggesting adaptability and self-sustaining futures interconnected with the built environment. I look directly at the tensions between desirability and undesirability, scenic and unscenic, machine-made and hand made. I slow time in this region mechanized by grease, gears, freight trains and trucks. My hope is that through my work, viewers also become curious about that which they otherwise would not stop to look at.

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