My senior project explores the relationship between language, materiality, and affectivity. Following an encounter with Bruce Nauman’s Make Me Think Me, I was drawn deeply into deciphering the meaning of words, analyzing what text stands for, and theorizing the nature of communication.
Sister Corita Kent says, “it is necessary to turn the words over to see what’s on the other side.”
I have discovered different materials and strategies of art-making to turn words over and over. Every medium has its communicative strengths and limitations.
Through the embodied repetition of embroidery, I learned words can lose meaning and become mere yarn.
Working with video tunes the viewer into the sense of sound and connects breath, as the medium does the viewing for them.
Painting is a fluid act of invitation asking to be interpreted.
There is so much I am curious about. Metabolizing it when prompted with the question of:
“What did you do your senior year?”
I say “I made things out of language.”