Date of Award
Spring 5-22-2026
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Fine Arts (MFA)
Department
Painting
First Advisor
Meena Hasan
Second Advisor
Yasi Alipour
Third Advisor
Dana DeGiulio
Abstract
This thesis examines time as a durational, non-linear condition shaped through emotion and perception rather than a sequence of forward-moving events. Through painting and related material strategies, the work focuses on aftermath, residue, interruption, and return. Throughout this thesis, terms such as misalignment, double vision, fragmentation, interruption, and recurrence function as a conceptual vocabulary for describing instability within memory, embodiment, and lived experience. Blurred edges, doubled forms, and punctures in the surface register a lag between experience and comprehension, especially in relation to grief, trauma, depression, memory, and embodied perception. Neon color functions as a counterpoint to delay, signaling persistence, charge, and the afterimage of what continues to reverberate. Drawing on Stoic, Vedic, surrealist, and Nietzschean ideas of cyclical time, this thesis argues that lived experience does not obey the orderly structures imposed by clocks, productivity, or linear narratives of healing. Instead, emotional and perceptual life returns in fragments, accumulating through repetition and altered reencounter. Nature, mortality, and sculptural interruption further inform this framework, positioning the work as a site where absence becomes material and where duration is felt rather than measured. Rather than asking the viewer to decode a fixed meaning, the work invites a slower form of attention and co-witnessing: an inhabitation of unresolved time in which perception, memory, and material remain active together.
Recommended Citation
Lowe, Kati, "Held In Sediment" (2026). Masters Theses. 1601.
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/masterstheses/1601
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.