No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

Caput Mortuum is a visual representation of my own spiritual quest for enlightenment using alchemy. Ancient alchemists sought perfection in all things and visualized a personal spiritual hierarchy that resided within all physical matter. The lowest tier of this scale represents the dull and lifeless material while the highest could touch the Divine. Reshaping the material world revealed the ordinary item's latent potential, aiding in its own transformation as well as the alchemist's into more perfect beings. Inspired by this idea, I seek to bring ultimate perfection to every piece I create. By manipulating and altering books and book forms I replicate the physical work alchemists performed, each time changing myself with the book, elevating our spiritual beings in order to bring perfection from within.

The purpose of my thesis project, A View of Affect has been two fold: to engage closely with an early modern book, and to experiment with the idea that self-examination as a legitimate way to gain knowledge about the body. Working with Robert Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy, (1621) has opened to view the extensive constellation of ideas that were part of the philosophical universe of the time. I engaged with the Anatomy of Melancholy by immersing myself in the prose, responding to Burton's writing with my own writing. I also studied and made drawings from early modern anatomical illustrations, and I drew shapes found in nature that seemed analogous to shapes in the body. All the while, I relied firmly on my own observations. The shapes found in nature, and the line quality in the early modern prints influenced my drawings, but I only drew what I saw. A View of Affect is not a historical model, but I did fully embrace Burton's belief in the importance of direct observation. The purpose of my treatise on the how emotions exist and function in the body is not to specify what is there for others, but to encourage readers to look carefully at their own internal life.

As Yet Uncertain: A Portrait in Procession is an installation of prints featuring a combination of image and text. Drawing inspiration from various depictions of the grotesque in art and literature, the project examines the grotesque form, both in body and mind. As Yet Uncertain: A Portrait in Procession observes how the grotesque—a body that is always in the act of becoming—relates to uncertainties and ambivalence in identity and humanity.

This study investigates the destruction of books carried out by artists during the second half of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first century. It proposes the term 'artistic biblioclasm' as a general category that groups these processes together, and distinguishes this category from works of art that also deal with the theme of the book but make use of other media (rather than real books). In my own practice, various biblioclastic processes are applied, documented and then discussed in the thesis. I analyse the aesthetic, political, religious and other implications of artistic biblioclasm in my work, with particular emphasis on the cultural (and Catholic) context in which the work was shown: the Mediterranean islands of Malta and Gozo. 'Part One' opens with a review of the literature related to the theoretical perspectives that inform the thesis. This is followed by the 'Practice Methodology', which identifies the methods used in my work and offers some preliminary reflections about the theoretical dimensions of these methods. 'Part Two' explores the historical background of artistic erasure in the twentieth century and develops a descriptive and contextual typology of biblioclastic practices, classifying them into four groups: book alterations, biblioclastic book-objects, formless books and dematerialised books. 'Part Three' advances Jean-François Lyotard's work about the sublime in aesthetics as a viable theoretical framework that firmly defines artistic biblioclasm as a postmodern (rather than modem) artistic phenomenon. This connection with Lyotard's work is made possible by comparing the formlessness of the sublime to the loss of the book's 'form' in biblioclastic processes and also by linking some relatively little-known essays by Lyotard that focus on biblioclasm or the book to other, better-known areas such as the sublime and postmodernism. 'Part Four' focuses on the political and religious dimensions of biblioclasm and the problem of representation. It distinguishes between politically repressive or fundamentalist forms of biblioclasm and artistic biblioclasm. Lyotard's notion of the 'unpresentable' - influenced by his reflections on Judaism and the Holocaust - is examined and linked to earlier discussions about the sublime and to the work of some artists described in 'Part Two'. Analogously, in my practice the Catholic idea of the book as an authoritative figure ('Magisterium') is elaborated and 'deconstructed' in the actual processes that make use of doctrinal texts. The research concludes by interpreting artistic biblioclasm as an attack on the closure of the book (with Jewish undertones) and a form of resistance to totalising political or religious forces. In my work, dogmatic interpretations of books and their 'truth' are related to the threatening possibility of violence in contemporary societies, and are ultimately shown to be self-destructive.

An interweaving of text and image.

Trace Time is an interdisciplinary book arts exhibit featuring handmade paper installations, one-of-a-kind prints and book objects, and a fine press artist’s book in edition. The theme of this work focuses on the relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world by examining the tension between organic lifecycles and human cultivation, control, and constraint of the environment. By following a system for tracing natural surroundings, I document environmental movement in a series of time-based sequential pieces measuring light, water, and color.

No description available.