KAYLA ALLEN Kayla is a Master’s student in the School of Civil and Environmental Engineering with an emphasis in structural engineering. I have always had an interest in the arts, from drawing to painting to music to poetry and so on. I find engineering fascinating because of the way that art can be found in many aspects of design and the way that engineering principles can also be found in art.
"THE LIFE BRINGER" GRAPHITE ON PAPER, 15"×15” This is a surrealist piece done with graphite. I really enjoy surrealist art because I feel it is a way to express emotions that aren’t easily put into words or represented by everyday objects. In this piece we were required to start with a still life of flowers in a vase and then add surrealist elements that had meaning to us and represented more than what meets the eye. I chose to play around with the contrast of life and death in my piece with the live flowers morphing into bones, and the tank, an object which is often a symbol of destruction, on a record player, representative of creation of music. I also enjoy the possibility that the flowers are coming to life out of the bones because I feel like that is what music does for me. I chose to call the record player the life bringer because music truly does bring me back to life and I felt like that could also be happening to the flowers. The tank was initially thought of because I felt the arm of the record player resembled a tank and the surrealist element allowed to run with and explore that idea in a way that a traditional still life would not have. With this piece I enjoyed being able to take something I saw physically and morph it into something with a bit more meaning.
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