Haverford College 2020 Fine Arts Senior Thesis Exhibition

DEPARTMENT OF FINE ARTS

Jane Lutnick Fine Arts Center, Haverford College · Http://www.haverford.edu/fine-arts

2020

Fine Arts Senior Thesis Exhibition MAY 1-16, 2020 · online at www.2020seniorthesis.com

This catalogue was produced on the occasion of the Fine Arts Senior Thesis Exhibition, May 1–16, 2020.

Like every other aspect of academic life, the Department of Fine Art’s schedule of exhibitions was drastically altered by the COVID-19 shutdown. Originally slated for installation in Haverford College’s Cantor Fitzgerald Gallery, the Senior Thesis Exhibition this year is appearing in an online, virtual format, accessible at www.2020seniorthesis.com

Fine Arts Senior Thesis Exhibition MAY 1-16, 2020 A virtual exhibition on view at www.2020seniorthesis.com

The Haverford Department of Fine Arts is pleased to present the 2020 Senior Thesis Exhibition marking the graduation of Delilah Buitrago (printmaking), Sarah Jesup (printmaking), Emily Williams (photography) and Hana Luisa Binte Yaacob (drawing).

All majors in Fine Arts are required to take the intensive, year-long Senior Seminar, during which they explore the themes, methods, and concepts presented in this exhibition. Throughout their senior year, they master the techniques and develop the visual vocabulary in their concentration to shape a coherent body of work. For the four seniors graduating in 2020, the exhibition represents the culmination of their studies at Haverford College. In light of the COVID-19 situation, this year’s exhibition is presented as an online virtual installation.

The Department of Fine Arts encourages all students to bring to their art the full weight of the liberal arts education they have gained at Haverford. This year-long thesis project reflects the individual growth of the artists as well as their commitment to the cultural vitality of the wider community.

Hee Sook Kim Chair, Department of Fine Arts

The Class of 2020:

Delilah Buitrago printmaking

Sarah Jesup printmaking

Emily Williams photography

Hana Luisa Binte Yaacob

drawing

Left:

The artist at work, April 24

Delilah Buitrago printmaking

M y thesis is a children’s book that I am writing M and illustrating. The illustrations are all prints that I’ve created using lithography and digital programs.

The story is inspired by my own family members, my two-year-old cousins who are triplets. In the book they are the three main characters that speak directly to the reader about the importance of being unique and why every child should embrace their differences.

I want to create this children’s book because the topic that I touch upon is something that children need to be taught in life, especially when they are going to be interacting with different kinds of people. It is geared toward children up to 5 years old, but can be read to or with children older than that depending on reading level. Learning about how important it is to accept others, despite their differences and your own differences, is beneficial when developing meaningful relationships, and

developing a strong sense of self-confidence. My prints are very simple, composed of lined drawings with vibrant solid colors. Their simplicity in style is similar in that of a children’s coloring book and drawings done by children, which I think is appealing to a younger audience. Illustrators that have inspired my style and color options are Carolina Farias and Emma Farrarons.

I hope I have created a children’s book that is straightforward, eye catching, and meaningful.

I want the children reading this, or being read to, to see themselves represented in this short book about being unique. I want them to feel secure in whom they are and to understand that there is a beauty in everyone no matter how different they look from you. I hope that my audience learns that although a person may look different in appearance, people are more than their looks.

Clockwise, from above:

Kinds of Food

2020, digital print with ink and felt marker, 12 x 9 in.

Just Be You (book cover)

2020, digital print with ink and felt marker, 12 x 9 in.

Final fall critique, Parker House December 11

Senior seminar critique with Gustavo Garcia March 4

Does Your hair Curl

2020, digital print with ink and felt marker, 12 x 9 in.

Studio scene

April 24

Left:

The artist pulling a print in the Locker Building, March 15

Sarah Jesup printmaking Memoria M rchids bound my three paternal grandparents O together. Phil Jesup was bitten by the orchid bug first. My namesake, Sarah Stifler Jesup, caught the bug after they married in 1959. After their divorce, Phil married another orchidist, Ann Lauer Jesup, in 1973. Together, Phil and Ann bred orchids, wrote and edited articles, and judged competitions. They were highly regarded in the orchid community, which, like their generation, is now in its twilight.

As I began this project, Ann, my last surviving paternal grandparent, was preparing to move from the family house of 55 years to a retirement community. In this time of transition, recalling memories and learning more about my grandparents felt especially important.

This elegy in etchings for my grandparents and the life’s work that connected them creates a metaphorical portrait of them by illustrating a series of defining moments in the arc of their lives. Each print tells a short story, and the short stories connect to give a more com-

plete portrait of their lives and their hobby (or obsession). I only experienced the tail end of that journey, but in retracing the earlier steps I have come to understand family in a way I hadn’t before.

The images are personal in scale, reflecting the closeness of family connections. Each print contains two layers. The first is my orchid drawing with a handwritten story and the second is a family photo: together they form a snapshot in time. The colors of my prints mirror those found in nature. The first images in the series are produced using a laser to etch my drawing onto a 9 x 9-inch Plexiglas plate, printed on white Lennox paper. Other images are created using paper lithography techniques and watercolor.

The style of the drawings was inspired by my grandmother, Sarah, whose incredibly detailed botanical drawings are displayed in my parents’ house. In part, this is my way of carrying on the family tradition. I’m not growing orchids, but I’m following in Sarah’s footsteps and transforming this family fascination into another form.

Counter-clockwise from above:

Pulling prints in the Locker Building March 15

Studio wall, Parker House October 30

Senior seminar critique with Gustavo Garcia and Professor Kim March 4

Clockwise from above:

With Professor Kim in the Parker House studio, final fall critique December 11

Epidendrum endressi

2020, lithograph with ink and watercolor, 11½ x 7¾ in.

Studio wall with Great Cattleya (2019, etching, plate 9¼ x 9½ in.)

November 27

Epidendrum ciliare

2019, etching, 9¼ x 9¼ in.

Left:

The artist at work in April

Emily Williams photography

Home/Solitude I dedicate this series to my grandfather, Leon Williams z”l ‫אני מקדישה את סדרת התמונות האלה לזכר סבי היקר‬ ‫לב מיכאל ז”ל‬

D M riven by my frustration with the passage of time without a singular place to call home, I started to think

about the meaning of home—a feeling rather than a physical space. A feeling that I chased, both literally and figuratively, while running countless miles on roads both familiar and unfamiliar. Listening to the sound of my own feet, in part, lead me to this series.

As the series grew, it started to center around solitude, the feeling I always circle back to when meditating on home. I wanted to explore the range of emotions contained in solitude—from loneliness, to peace, to anger. I aim to create visual representations of quiet that convey and explore the nuances among feelings that come with large amounts of time spent alone.

My photography searches for the evidence of humanity—an unmade bed, an abandoned shoe, an open window, a dilapidated gate—to discover who was or will be in that space. I want to find places that mean something to whomever may have inhabited them but appear vacant at the moment they are photographed. I felt the mundane, uninhabited nature of these scenes best convey solitude.

In the first few months of working, I mostly photographed inside houses. I was drawn to the easily recognizable evidence of their inhabitants. Later, other spaces that were not as easily recognizable as inhabited, such as landscapes and abstract pieces, were incorporated into my work.

Throughout the year, I have been consistently concerned with the geometry of my compositions and

the exploration of different patterns of light. How light shapes what we see, how it defines space, and how its presence and absence creates mood fascinates me.

I used analog and digital processes in making and printing my photographs. I have printed on 11 in. x 14 in. Ilford warmtone, silver gelatin paper, and made inkjet prints on Baryta Photo Rag paper of the same size. I started by printing on the Ilford warmtone paper in the darkroom, and found that it allowed for more detail to be visible in heavy shadows. I chose the Baryta Photo Rag because it was the closest digital equivalent. I have used both the analog and digital processes in order to print each photograph in the process that suits it best. The photographs are taken primarily with Kodak 400TX film, in both the 35mm and 120mm sizes; I have on several occasions used Ilford HP5 for my 35mm photographs. Both of these films have a wide exposure latitude, allowing me to push and pull them as needed and giving me the flexibility to shoot in a wide range of lighting situations.

My work is inspired by that of Abelardo Morell, mainly from his three series Childhood, Still Lives, and Light, Time, and Optics. He records light and shadow, patterns, and domesticity to create compelling photographs of the everyday. I draw aspects of my creative process from Haruki Murakami’s book What I Talk about When I Talk about Running, where Murakami seamlessly connects his work as a fiction writer with running.

Clockwise from opposite, top:

Carville, Louisiana

January 2020, inkjet print, 10 x 10 in.

Consulting with Professor Baenziger in Parker House, final fall critique December 11

Studio wall in Parker House February 12

In Parker House studio for Senior Seminar critique October 30

Plaquemine, Louisiana

October 2019, inkjet print, 13½ x 9 in.

Studio wall in Parker House October 23

Left:

The artist working on a collage and painting in Parker House, March 4

Hana Luisa Binte Yaacob drawing

The Power

M M y Malay father is Muslim and as is dictated

by custom, I was raised to follow his faith from the day I was born. Alongside influence from my more open-minded Puerto Rican mother, I grew up with contradictory messages of female worth. Women in Islam face oppression due to their sex, and while my father is relatively progressive, I developed a deep shame toward my own body, a large amount of internalized misogyny, and a confusing relationship to spirituality.

In June of 2019, I found out that as a baby I had nearly been forced to undergo female circumcision –a euphemism for female genital mutilation –where parts of my labia would have been cut off to prevent sin. Since I was 13, coinciding with the beginning of my menstrual cycle, I had already begun to grow more disillusioned with Islam and other organized religions and their deep misogyny.

This discovery was a tipping point for me. These experiences prompted a series exploring my journey of critiquing and exposing the layers of misogyny embedded within Islam and Christianity.

I started with watercolor and acrylic gouache, 12 x 18 inch illustrations exploring different facets of female oppression in Islam –from the practices of ghyusl hayad (ritual purification after a menstrual cycle), to female genital mutilation and its ties to tamkin (belief in women’s sexual submission to men). In these illustrations, I primarily used

greens and yellows: green is the symbolic color of Islam, and yellow a color traditionally reserved for Malay royalty, which culturally required total and unwavering submission from their subjects. I chose the medium of watercolors as I felt it best captures both the surreal energy of spirituality and emotions, as well as vividly represents the real world over which these energies are mapped.

As I worked, this critique coalesced in the question, “How can God be self-created?” Having a self-created male God with no mother denies women’s power to create life, and as such, is a denial of women. The second half of my thesis is thus an exploration and celebration of women’s power and everything these religions have denied. In these works, I use primarily reds and blues. Red is a color of luck and courage in pre-Islamic pagan Malay culture, while blue references the influence of my lapsedCatholic mother. Catholicism reserves blue for Mary, a symbol to me of womanhood – patriarchal expectation and responsibility, sacrifice for a patriarchal figure, loss, and rebellion in demanding justice from God. I see the endpoint of my thesis work thus as a promise of realized female power, of a security and love for the female body that I am, and as an answer to my own persistent questions of spirituality.

My thesis is not about answering whether there is a God or if I believe in one. Rather, if divinity exists, it is in me.

Clockwise from below:

Senior Seminar critique, Parker House

January 22 (On wall: Self 2019, watercolor, 24 x 18 in. )

My Body Can Build Hands That Grasp 2019, watercolor, 30 x 22 in.

Mine

2019, watercolor, 18 x 12 in.

Hole

2020, watercolor, 18 x 12 in.

Divine Comparisons II

2020, watercolor, 18 x 12 in.

Clockwise from top:

Ghusyl Hayad

2019, watercolor, 18 x 12 in.

Consulting with Professor Wiliams, Senior Seminar final fall critique December 11

Studio view November 27

Divine Comparisons I

2020, watercolor, 9 x 12 in.

Special thanks to the Office of the Provost, whose support made this exhibition and catalogue possible.

Thanks also to Department of Fine Arts faculty members Markus Baenziger, Hee Sook Kim and William Williams, and to photography lab technician Daniel Burns, copy editor Naomi Mindlin and department assistant Shannon Murphy.