Date of Award
Spring 5-31-2025
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Department
Sculpture
First Advisor
Taylor Baldwin
Second Advisor
Gail Dodge
Third Advisor
Maria Aliberti Lubertazzi
Abstract
What does it look like to engage with organisms and landscapes at the periphery of anthropocentric value structures? How does one break the internalized myth that the “built” environment is excluded from the natural world? When does a hyper-mobile and hyper-commodified society confront the exponential crisis of animal death? Within this series of journal entries, field notes, collection observations, weird prose, and sensory musings, one will find questions on the nature of being human and the complex narratives of care we encounter in a world shared with more-than-humans. Each handwritten vignette and photograph from daily life weaves a non-linear and purposefully open-ended archive of the excluded middle, a space between definitions and exclusionary boundaries. The threads of this book are not intended to create finite conclusions, closed loops, or summaries of regurgitated research; rather, they are meant to fashion openings into an intimate process of attuning to ecological life outside and within human-centric systems. This archive remains intentionally incomplete as the process of constructing ecological thinking is always ongoing and cannot be developed in isolation. The sometimes absurd, empathetic, strange, beautiful, sad, and occasionally grotesque moments expressed within this journal reflect only a microscopic fragment of the infinitely complex existence of being a living organism. To attend to our porous, uncanny world is to see the breaks in logic and the gaps where things are not fully definable by appearance or data alone. By necessity, this work requires a porosity within our cognition, allowing the sensory body and our hyper-verbal, certainty-craving minds to find overlap between intuitive understanding and scientific reasoning.
Recommended Citation
Kouts, Carrie E., "Field Journal: The Excluded Middle" (2025). Masters Theses. 1524.
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/masterstheses/1524
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Included in
Animals Commons, Animal Structures Commons, Animal Studies Commons, Art Practice Commons, Biodiversity Commons, Biology Commons, Cognition and Perception Commons, Cognitive Science Commons, Demography, Population, and Ecology Commons, Environmental Education Commons, Environmental Health and Protection Commons, Environmental Studies Commons, Evolution Commons, Human Ecology Commons, Human Geography Commons, Interdisciplinary Arts and Media Commons, Natural Resources and Conservation Commons, Nature and Society Relations Commons, Other Animal Sciences Commons, Other Ecology and Evolutionary Biology Commons, Other Environmental Sciences Commons, Outdoor Education Commons, Place and Environment Commons, Plants Commons, Sculpture Commons, Sense Organs Commons, Sustainability Commons, Theory and Philosophy Commons, Theory, Knowledge and Science Commons, Weed Science Commons