Blog Workshop

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The Ride of a Lifetime

Abstract
Drawing is my way of expressing that which cannot be adequately expressed through any other means. I have drawn with charcoal to connect my feelings of grief over my husband’s death with a larger story of loss. I have drawn, and continue to draw, with black sewing thread on white shirts gathered from the closets of my deceased husband, from family, friends, and strangers. These sculptured drawings evolve as emotive gestures that flow through me as I look, listen, and respond to the energy I perceive from my ancestors, who sewed white-collared shirts to survive in America after immigrating from Lebanon; and from artists with whose work I engage.
This thesis weaves the narrative of the struggles of my ancestors with my story of the recent challenges I faced in the studio after my loss. I connect the writings of Roger Pogue Harrison and Alexander McQueen, who both speak of death as a vehicle for informing authorship, to the redefining of my artistic practice. I document how my challenges to first express my own personal grief, using the mark on the page, evolved into an effort to connect to a larger collective grief, the grief and struggles of my ancestors through a self-imposed ritual of “letting go” (Kentridge). I show my process of exchange in making as I examined, appropriated, and recaptured the marks and methods of other artists who embody the element of loss, such as Arnulf Rainer, William Kentridge, Cornelia Parker, Annette Lemieux, and Chiharu Shiota. I speak of James Elkins’s writings on the process of sight as an influence on my transition from two-dimensional drawings to the use of object as a canvas for three-dimensional portraiture. The outcome springs from a more observant way of looking and listening, and an art that reminds me that I am not self-authored, but am connected to and formed by the marks of those who came before me.


To view DrawnOnwarD in its entirety, click on the White Papers link to the right!

The Legacy of Making

I come from a family of makers steeped in tradition.
My ancestors made white shirts.
I take them apart.
What they were constructing, I am dismantling, ripping.
Recapturing, Reimagining, Remaining.

The Ride is Eternal

“Art is never an end in itself; it is only an instrument for tracing the lines of lives”
-Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari

Why create art about death?
“It is important to look at death because it is a part of life”, says Alexander McQueen. “ It is a sad thing, melancholic but romantic at the same time. It is the end of a cycle—everything has to end. The cycle of life is positive because it gives room for new things.

As I searched to uncover a displaced identity, due to the loss of my husband, I was simultaneously battling the role of the artist in this 21st century—where the blurring of media mirrored a culture that lacked definition, and the use of traditional materials to convey meaning was dying.
Travel with me through the spaces of this thesis as I am led through the emergent process of the rituals of making, an interchange between losing and finding, which transports me into dialogue with others, past and present, who have influenced my artistic practice.
The outcome is one rich memorial: a vessel that houses the marks of those peoples and traditions that have gone before me in order that they may remain living. Through art we are reminded that we are not alone, that we come from all who have come before us and that our identities are formed through a collective consciousness, always evolving and redefining ourselves and others to come.
We are formed by the marks of others. We inform others through the marks we leave behind.
It is the cycle of life.

Five Images

Here is the screen shot for the 5 final images sent for the Graduation Exhibition Catalog.
Thank you photographer Rick Koconis for the exceptional work.