In Athens in the early 5th century BCE, a new genre of funerary vase, the white-ground lêkythos, appeared and quickly grew to be the most popular grave gift for nearly a century. These particular vases, along with their relatively delicate style of painting, ushered in a new funerary scene par excellence, which highlighted the sorrow of the living and the merits of the deceased by focusing on personal moments of grief in the presence of a grave. Earlier Attic funerary imagery tended to focus on crowded prothesis scenes where mourners announced their grief and honored the dead through exaggerated, violent and frenzied gestures. The scenes on white-ground lêkythoi accomplished the same ends through new means, namely by focusing on individual mourners and the emotional ways that mourners privately nourished the deceased and their memory. Such scenes combine ritual activity (i.e. dedicating gifts, decorating the grave, pouring libations) with emotional expressions of sadness, which make them more vivid and relatable. The nuances in the characteristics of the mourners indicate a new interest in adding an individual touch to the expression, which might “speak” to a particular moment or variety of sadness that might relate to a potential consumer. To facilitate a meaningful discussion of the range of ways that white-ground painters articulated grief and lament in their vases, the dissertation is divided into six chapters, each of which concentrates on a particular type of mourner: women, men, elderly men, infants, vocal visitors and the deceased. Discussing the visual iconography across these different groups demonstrates that the shared and individual, public and private, intentional and candid aspects of grief and mourning can be shown simultaneously and that it was of interest to the Athenians to look at images that incorporated all of these aspects.

Thesis (M.F.A.) -- Montana State University -- Bozeman, 2006. / Typescript. Chairperson, Graduate Committee: N. Rick Pope.

The purpose of this creative project was to represent the structure and dynamics of the emotion of grief through a visual medium. Grief, as a process that occurs over time, is usually represented sequentially and verbally as in the writings of Elisabeth Kubler-Ross. This project depicts the stages of grief by representing them both sequentially and simultaneously from a first person point of view by means of a visual medium, (i.e., videotape) in order to emotionally and personally involve the viewer in the process.The creative project is comprised of four video tapes each differing in length. of time between fifteen to thirtyfive minutes. The video tapes are presented as a documentary having a total of five participants who candidly express their experience with the death of a significant person in their lives and how they dealt with their grief. The four videos are shown all at the same time with the television monitors approximately twelve to fifteen feet apart.The video tapes are on file in the Art Department. / Department of Art

Thesis (M.S.W.)--Smith College School for Social Work, Northampton, Mass., 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 85-89).

Thesis (M.F.A.)--Rochester Institute of Technology, 2009. / Typescript. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 25-26).

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This dissertation is an analysis and critical framing of my recent compositional work, magnolias in bloom (2022) and Weavings (2023), both of which utilize ephemerality as a sonic and physical property to illustrate the content and narrative of the compositions. I give an overview of the last five years of installations, performances, and compositions and highlight ideas of grief, identity, and queerness within my recent work. I investigate how my composition magnolias in bloom uses the ephemeral nature of unfired clay and amplifies the sound it makes when immersed in water as a metaphor for loss and grief. I also look at how the unstable nature of analog modular synthesis, nonlinear modulation, and timbral fluidity contribute to themes of queer theory and identity politics. Through these works, ephemera is left behind in the form of clay and patch cables. At the end of each chapter I examine works that have both influenced and informed my practice and throughout the dissertation, I highlight the writings of José Esteban Muñoz, Pauline Oliveros, and bell hooks to relate their work to my own practice. My analysis of magnolias in bloom and Weavings through a lens of ephemerality draws a connecting thread between the two vastly different compositions.