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ORCID
https://orcid.org/0009-0003-0017-7367
Date of Graduation
5-15-2026
Semester of Graduation
Spring
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Department
School of Art, Design, and Art History
First Advisor
Gregory Stewart
Second Advisor
Robert Mertens
Third Advisor
William Wightman
Abstract
Weaving Eigengrau explores weaving as both a material ritual and an inquiry about how reality is constructed and can be pulled apart. In this project, weaving becomes a method for redirecting forces into woven patterns and examining the relationship of contradiction by treating the contrasts between light and shadow, stillness and motion, and the fixed and the ephemeral as sculptural aspects. I’m driven by theories of reality: science, myth, and philosophy, and the common threads among them. Across systems of knowledge, reality is depicted in contradiction, and I seek to blur the lines between them. Within this convergence, weaving becomes a language for speculating about time and reality. At the center of this inquiry is eigengrau: the intrinsic gray perceived in the absence of light, often described as the color of shadow itself. As a phenomenon defined by what it is not, neither illumination nor full darkness, eigengrau offers a primary conceptual framework for searching for, and speculating opportunities to tinker with eigengrau-like conditions: paths of movement, water, waves, and shadows. By bringing together the art of weaving and the intangible grey, I am trying to depict the friction between absence and presence, the ephemeral, and what cannot be articulated. In primarily watercolors, the paintings exist in a teetering state of emergence, not being fully resolved as formal objects. The provisionary nature of the watercolor is a gesture of questioning the fixity of knowledge structures and reality, as well as speculating artistic reconstructions of its elements, from an ephemeral voice.
Included in
Aesthetics Commons, Art Practice Commons, Epistemology Commons, Fine Arts Commons, Metaphysics Commons
