dc.contributor	Ace, Samuel
dc.contributor	Maciuba, Amanda
dc.contributor.advisor	Bouton, Ligia
dc.contributor.author	Booker, Levi
dc.date.accessioned	2020-05-11T13:13:40Z
dc.date.available	2020-05-11T13:13:40Z
dc.date.gradyear	2020	en_US
dc.date.issued	2020-05-11
dc.description.abstract	My art practice primarily utilizes handmade paper to create works that are both alluring and repulsive in the ways they represent the human body. As a transmasculine nonbinary artist, I am challenging representation that can make people uncomfortable by being vulnerable with my body. Through video, handmade paper, and the process of making body casts, I embrace manipulating the image of my body to create monstrous or mythical hybrids to reflect the experience of being “othered” and living in a state of hyper awareness around gendered visibility. In Akiko Busch’s book, How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency, Busch presents an argument that claims true liberation from the confines of societal structures and psychological exhaustion comes from re-evaluating the ways in which we connect to nature. Instead, she suggests defiantly detaching from the pressures to be completely understood or “seen” by society through ritualistically surrendering to the environment. The full bodily engagement, use of natural plant fibers, and meditative process inherent to hand papermaking can be likened to that notion of surrendering to the environment as it becomes a self-healing and liberating process to mediate the frustration and rage of being “unseen” in everyday life. My work acknowledges the internal effort put into that experience to find peace and comfort within the self through the process of making paper. At the same time, I categorize my usage of hybridity and unsettling bodily forms as an external, public method of processing negative experience. Therefore, my body of work blends the external and internal response to defying gender conformity: calling attention to the arbitrary yet confining structures around bodily normativity while simultaneously working in a process that functions as a ritualized act of healing and ownership of the body in communion with nature. The physicality of making paper and sculptural body casts demands an intentional awareness and exploration of the body that confronts the uncomfortable and the intimate. In these processes of making, my body and handmade paper become a vessel for expressing a nonbinary transgender experience and radical reclamation of the self.	en_US
dc.description.sponsorship	Art Studio	en_US
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/10166/5971
dc.language.iso	en_US	en_US
dc.rights.restricted	public	en_US
dc.subject	Papermaking	en_US
dc.subject	Monstrosity	en_US
dc.subject	Sculpture	en_US
dc.subject	Transgender	en_US
dc.title	Flesh and Mud: Bodily Deconstruction through Handmade Paper	en_US
dc.type	Thesis
mhc.degree	Undergraduate	en_US
mhc.institution	Mount Holyoke College

Flesh and Mud: Bodily Deconstruction through Handmade Paper

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