Date of Award

Spring 6-4-2022

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts (MFA)

Department

Glass

First Advisor

Jocelyne Prince

Second Advisor

Rachel Berwick

Third Advisor

Denise Markonish

Abstract

This project is an acknowledgment of reshaped landscapes while also understanding that this moment of time is only relevant to my own human lifespan and perspective. The work embodies unmet expectations when one confronts a memory landscape of their, or my, childhood. Specifically, I am discussing the chasm between reality and memory through a recent return to my childhood home in Colorado, and was met by two of the largest wildfires in the state’s history. This project takes a moment to digest that loss, of what was known, what was not, and can no longer be known: forests, trees, and other time-honed flora. The construct of mirage and memory are at play–both hold various truths in relation to distance between viewer and that which is viewed. Glass is used as a way to explore recasting based on the ability both to shape-shift and maintain a material memory. Studies include casting and recasting trees to explore various stages of transmutation from one material to another: adapting historic glass recipes that embody loss and creation; building protective (but futile) glass cocoons that suggest physical and metaphorical change; and employing Schlieren imaging to explore the role temperature plays in how “recasting” is perceived. I am exploring a feedback loop—a recasting—between creation and loss where material, time, place, and scale transform into different forms both physically and through memory. Recasting is the transmutation—or change from one material to another—which physically embodies a vast slurry of eras, material, histories, places, and scales.

Comments

View exhibition online: Mandy Lee, Retelling a landscape through the alchemy of recasting

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