My favorite product from this semester and from my studies as
a whole in my major, this piece was created to express the conceptual and
evolutional development
of language from physiological experience, how environment and language
both inform and create each other in "conversation".
One of the greatest delights in my major studies was learning about the Oxford English Dictionary in Professor Eddy's Environmental Theory class. While many may count sheep trying to sleep at night, as a child, I used to break up words and wondered what the parts really meant and where they came from. This fabulous resource answered those questions, tracing the history and development of words through their root meanings. It provided me access into the concrete experiences from which words stem.
My effort here was to
illustrate the idea of "Metaphor's Metamorphosis": to reveal
the linguistic transformations that tie human experience with the
environment, humans creating words to reflect meaning of
what they see (God's eye, dayes ye), then extending this meaning
further as they recognize a similar image - in a daisy blossoming in
spring - and the word evolves, collapsing into a simpler expression,
but still linked to the larger visions behind it. I've always been
interested in spiritual connotations, the added element in this piece
was a bonus.
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This notecard reflects a collaborative capstone effort. Conducting a semester long study of
Mount Mansfield and Camels Hump from my residence hall picture
window, I created artwork with many styles and designs in
different mediums with
a variety of instruments and tools. My goal was to explore and
illustrate my perception of the
mountains and landscape during different times of the day and as the
seasons progressed during the semester. My thesis advisor, Ian Worley,
and I would then have conversations about the pieces and explore new
ways to move next.
As a calligrapher and from studies in landscape topology, an
important element of expression, creation and view is space - what is
not there, what is not seen. From the collection of my work, a
small silhouette in pen and ink captured the "essence" of one
favored site. Ian and I
brainstormed about what I might do with this "line" whose edge captured
the space of a favorite mountain. As we considered using the line
on the front of a notecard and creating an expression that might go
with it, Ian remarked, "Mountains are but waves
of land." It gave a wonderful connecting image to land and water, line
and form, and crossing metaphors; it also reflected in the card's
insert what could be seen in the overlap of words with the line above
it.
Put together such that the front page line overlays the top edge of the darker words inked underneath and inside the card, if I can figure out how to create this on this website, I'll update this page so you can experience that shift yourself. Meanwhile, it's a fun, conceptual, visual, and linguistic collaboration that seemed a fitting conclusion to the many images and explorations I'd done over the semester.
A
final aspect of my senior work involved reading books and poems
about nature and
the environment, learning how other people perceived and expressed
their connection to their environment. Robert Frost's "Birches" has
always been a favorite of
mine. Two lines in particular spoke to me of the collective
relationship between Earth and humans, and between humans themselves,
while also hinting again at a possible metaphysical presence for me.
I illustrated this seeking to capture the image of Earth in a
larger "sky" among the human connection between humans and also between
humans and earth, and the grounded present with the envisioned
possibilities looking "heavenward." I liked the simple line image of
the people which came from a photograph I'd seen that I turned into
silhouette, line form.
Years
after the completion of my Senior Thesis Project, I was standing on a
porch in Jericho with a friend and saw this meld of clouds
moving toward me. I was struck by the similarity in the image to waves,
though.instead of falling forward to crash ashore, they remained solid,
white, in mid-fall. The entire mass was moving
forward through the otherwise clear sky... water,/lake,/ocean. As I
continued to marvel, a "poem" popped into my head. Capturing the
image in
ink and the poem in calligraphy provided an opportunity to
embellish the double
meanings and images that wove in and out among the moving and
stationary elements. I include it here because it's where my work from
the 80's evolved to by the end of the decade.
