Artist Biography
I grew up surrounded by art, music, and creativity. My brother and I filled notebooks with drawings, I created stories and illustrated them, and my dad and I shared our drawings. He always gave me positive affirmations about my creations. Mom was artistically fashionable; I was always hiding in her closet trying her beautiful fabrics and beaded necklaces. I studied violin, piano, ukulele, and saxophone, my mom and dad were both musicians and encouraged me to explore the richness of musical sounds.
I have always had an interest in helping people and when I discovered the Expressive Arts Therapy major, something clicked in my brain. I am an interdisciplinary artist working with painting, drawing, 3D arts, collage, creative writing, poetry, story writing, music, sound, and mindfulness practice. My artwork gravitates towards the odd and the uncomfortable. Everyday objects become characterized by exaggerated features or by transforming into personified entities. When I create, I ask thought-provoking questions to allow my imagination to be free of restraints and to remain curious. An important aspect of my process is immersing myself in storytelling, both real and imaginative. Escaping through a visual representation of stories allows me to connect to both discovered and undiscovered parts of my identity and experiences.
This current series related to my thesis titled The 8 Interwoven Phases of Grief includes eight papier mache hand-decorated masks, with matching talismans and altars, all exemplifying eight phases of grief identified by the artist. Each grief phase was identified through creative writing. Ultimately each mask was responded to intermodally with a poem.
Thesis Abstract
This thesis focuses on the spiritual and emotional expression of grief through the arts. Grief is part of the human experience; expressed and acknowledged differently throughout cultures and traditions across the world. The deep emotional expressions and sometimes celebrations that occur during grief can be communicated, honored, and reflected on through the arts including visual, audio, performing, and literary arts. Through arts-based research methods, the researcher identified eight personal phases of grief during their own grief process. The phases were identified as emotions which include shock, denial, desperation, anger, anguish, revitalization, community, and integration. The emotions were infused into eight different papier mache masks, finished with acrylic, watercolor, and gouache paints, paper clay, paper, found objects, and gemstones. After the masks were created, they each became part of a two-object assemblage that included the mask and a personal object or talisman that the author felt connected to the emotional grief phase, which was placed in a way that the author referred to as an altar. After the altar was created, a written reflection led to a poetic response for each mask. The masks communicate the grief phase while the poem and altar amplify the authors emotional expression and spiritual connection to the grief phase. The thesis offers an opportunity to explore their own grief and to consider the emotion behind the mask, as well as encourage counseling therapists and expressive arts therapists to consider the use of grief phases with clients.
Encompassing Grief Through the Arts; A Spiritual and Emotional Expression 4