Artist Biography
I am a multimedia artist and art therapy major working with painting, ceramics, and beaded embroidery to transform emotion into form. My work is deeply rooted in the act of expelling feelings from my body through making, turning my experiences and emotions into something visible and tangible. My artistic inspiration comes from a lifelong experience with grief and loss. As a child, I saw grief as something invasive, like an infection that festered and consumed me. Through my art, I have begun to transform that relationship, shifting it from a parasitic form into something I can coexist with. Alongside this, I have always felt a desire to help others. Through my own experiences with art as a form of expression, I came to understand its potential and ability to help people. Pushing me towards my path of art and therapy. For my thesis, I created a body of work that includes a large ceramic sculpture with intricate internal beading and two paintings that weave together a story. This internal beading represents the guts of the animal. Being a physical representation of grief, eating a creature from the inside out, while the paintings expand on this idea through imagery that suggests the beginning of the infection of grief. Together, these works explore grief as both consuming and evolving. My creative practices help me process by making the invisible visible and creating space for personal reflection and connection to how the arts help me see, feel, and process my own lived experience. While this work was created with the intention of reaching a deeper part of myself, I also invite viewers to find their own meaning within my work.
Thesis Abstract
This thesis explores grief as a complex emotional experience and examines how mixed media art therapy can support emotional regulation and creative expression. Existing literature suggests that contemporary understandings of grief extend beyond death-related loss to include a wider range of experiences, while art therapy research highlights the effectiveness of nonverbal, layered, and intermodal approaches in accessing and expressing difficult emotions. Building on this foundation, the purpose of this study is to investigate how engaging in mixed media artmaking can deepen an individual’s understanding of their own grief. The body of work created over the course of several months includes a large ceramic sculpture of a deer with intricate internal beading, alongside two paintings that weave together a story. A physical representation of grief consuming a body from the inside out. While the paintings serve as the how and when grief made its way in the researcher’s life. As a response, journal entries were created to explore the experience and feelings that came to the surface while working on the project. A private conversation between the self and its grief. This work was created with the intention of reaching a deeper part of the self, but viewers are invited to find their own meaning in it and reflect on where their own grief begins and how it continues to exist within them.