Degree Type
Honors Capstone Project
Date of Submission
Spring 5-1-2005
Capstone Advisor
Ann Clarke
Honors Reader
Anne Beffel
Capstone Major
Art
Capstone College
Visual and Performing Arts
Audio/Visual Component
no
Capstone Prize Winner
no
Won Capstone Funding
no
Honors Categories
Creative
Subject Categories
Interactive Arts | Interdisciplinary Arts and Media
Abstract
My thesis project is structured around a friendship that grew into an artistic collaboration. Laura Williams and myself, Kristina Foley, pulled our resources and concepts together from two seemingly disparate fields of art, Fiber Structure and Interlocking and the Media Art Program, to explore our personal identification with Feminism, magic, and the role of art in illustrating history through revealing perspectives often kept hidden. Using fibers and textile pieces we explore a women’s history that has been kept private and held close to the body, while simultaneously using video and photography to re-imagine how the female is projected into the public sphere. By incorporating magic, or a visual component that encourages a sense of new possibilities, our work together is a manifestation, or culture dream, which we hope is both healing and empowering.
During the past three years we have worked together consistently using various styles of collaboration like juxtaposition, handing back and forth, and joined at the hip. Our personal experiences as female artists living and working in a patriarchal society encourage each of us to explore the roots of our individual mediums in the Feminist Movement of the 1960s. This helped lead us use collaboration as an anarchical and useful method of art making. Collaboration defies the history of the artist as individual, and primarily male, while it encourages new forms of communication and creativity. A strong collaboration takes time; the skills both parties gain are useful in both personal neighborhoods and professional environments. Better listening skills, trust, sensitivity, and understanding of the benefits and potential of cultural differences will develop in all collaborators.
Another advantage of collaboration is that it is great fun! The result of Laura and my friendship and artistic exploration is a show at Spark Gallery that represents a cumulative body of work we have made together. It is an environment in which the histories of our different pieces and the concepts they draw upon overlap and connect from room to room, body to body.
Recommended Citation
Foley, Kristina, "On Earth" (2005). Renée Crown University Honors Thesis Projects - All. 665.
https://surface.syr.edu/honors_capstone/665
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.
