30 - Colleen Merrill—Mirroring and Self-Affirmation through Art / December 15, 2019 by Vivian Liddell

Colleen Merrill on what inspired her research presentation “Mirroring: Affirming the Self as Parent, Artist, and Academic”:

Looking at the child stages of development in regards to Donald Winnicott who was another psychoanalyst who wrote the book "Playing in Reality" from 1971… And that book hashes out a few of these different stages of development— mirroring the transitional object, social awareness— and how these things relate to a child's sort of creative impulse. And I'm like how...what a great sort of metaphor to think about that too for the artist—for the parent—that they're also going through a very similar type of developmental stage in their own right. You know they're also going through these sort of formative years that a child is going through at the same time. When we have children, we're emerging in our careers, we're emerging as artists. Why don't we sort of recognize that and discuss that more? So that's sort of what inspired it.

28 - Virginia Griswold—Harnessing Materials with Memory to Convey the Ephemeral / October 1, 2019 by Vivian Liddell

As a mold maker/caster I'm always thinking about sequences of objects and thinking about repetition of objects and the arrangement of things in a way that one object relates to another has been important to me for a long time, I think. So, I think objects all offer individually something to a conversation, but it's often as a collective. They come to be sort of greater than the sum of their parts in terms of conceptually what it could mean. So in this case the fragments are important I think to me in terms of communicating fragility—even sort of an ephemeral quality. There's maybe a question in these objects about if they're finished or if they've been broken. You know, the thing about clay—and actually glass is similar, textiles is similar—the material has a memory. It sort of has a sense of... it carries with it what's been done.

12 - Zipporah Camille Thompson—To the Moon and Back, Searching through High and Low / February 11, 2018 by Vivian Liddell

Zipporah Camille Thompson on collecting source imagery:

I’m not to the place yet where I’m actually going to take my own photographs of landscapes—that’s something that I want to start doing. But what I do, is I start to kind of collect these found images—be it Google images or other sources on the internet—of different landscapes, different surfaces of the moon and then those become sources…points by which I can then abstract. …

So some of these (idea boards) then get a title and then they’re reference points for shows. Some of them do not have titles, and they just exist as boards...idea boards. And the beauty of it not being online…when you make them physical, it’s like this small, kind of curated, specifically for this thing‑ that I can then reference every day without having to find my laptop. …

One image then might inform, like one texture with another texture. And because I use so many different textures and layers, I think that that’s especially important— for me to see the connections.