Shannon Murphy Fine Arts Senior Thesis Project

Date
2014
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Haverford College. Department of Fine Arts
Type
Thesis
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Award
Language
eng
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Open Access
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Abstract
My project begins with two things that I always come back to: home and craft. A significant inspiration for me comes from traditional crafts such as quilting, knitting, and embroidery. In a home, these skills create objects that conjure a sense of warmth, comfort, and human connection. Similarly, the use of crafts can harbor these sentimentalities in an unfamiliar place. This idea of home and folk art relates to my project because all deal with material and subject matter that are familiar and produce a final product by combining multiple layers or parts. Makers of traditional crafts do so through a strict methodology and repetitive, meditative process, ultimately synthesizing a multiplicity of ideas and materials into a single piece. A single stitch: inconsequential until combined, over and over, into something rich and full of time and meaning. For my project, I chose to depict a series of landscapes from Valley Forge National Historical Park. I spent most of my childhood in the area and have visited the places in these images many times. My goal is to evoke a sense of place and sentimentality through these images while offering the viewer an opportunity to explore different combinations of patterns within one image. I am interested in compositions with very little sky, instead choosing to focus on the horizon line and foliage within the foreground and middle ground to emphasize naturally occurring patterns. The choice of landscape as subject matter creates a place that the viewer can enter; filling these spaces with repeating patterns I hope to convey the same sense of meticulous meditative process that is required of a piece of knitting or textile. Much like a quilt that combines separate fabric pieces, each holding distinct memories, into a tapestry of varying shapes, colors and patterns, these landscapes are a tribute to the tapestry of memories I associate with these places as well as the numerous processes that are used to synthesize a completed print.
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