My final MFA thesis exhibition at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, BC. July 2025
Check out more detailed photos from this installation and more of my recent work on my website.
If this email looks a little different never fear! I just switched the service I’m using for these updates. Nothing on your end will change.
I have been dragging my feet about making this update because I wanted to give myself some distance from the experience to reflect, and also I am patiently waiting for my paper to be publicly available, which may be a few weeks yet. I have officially submitted my 50ish-page written thesis to the Emily Carr University library repository for publication though, so I suppose it is time.
I won’t sugar-coat it, grad school was very hard. But overall I am very grateful for the experience. As many of you may know, I did not attend an art school for my undergraduate education. But as I have continued to develop my career as a practicing artist, there was always this allure of what if. For a long time I had a chip on my shoulder about the so-called “art world.” I did not feel like I fit in. Every time I tried to dabble in the world of fine art I felt out of the loop and misunderstood and it frustrated me. So when I decided to go back to school, I applied to Art school with a capital A. After all those years of practice since I was last rejected from an art institution, I wanted to see if I’d get in; I wanted a little taste just to say I did, to say I could, to be in on it, whatever it was.
Learning to understand the language of art, and speak it too was an extra learning curve I wasn’t expecting. Which in retrospect seems obvious, but as a chronic know-it-all, it didn’t occur to me that my self-taught understanding of a career in art was not the full picture. Being an artist can take many forms — a nature sketcher, a character designer, a tattooer, a ceramic mug slinger, a page margin doodler… This particular threshold into art academia was one that I, personally, wanted to cross. But that is not necessary to have a fulfilling life in the arts, just to be clear :).
In my community of close peers, I had become used to being the only artist in the group, but now all of sudden at Emily Carr, not only was I not the only artist, I was the youngest one in my cohort and one of the only ones coming in without an art degree. Also, I was one of 2 Americans in a room of Canadians, which didn’t seem too significant at first, but there were subtle cultural differences I had to figure out along the way.
It was intimidating and overwhelming, and it was hard to keep up at first. But I plugged away trying my best to read dense and abstract pieces of writing and doing plenty of creative experiments. Ultimately, I finished the program with a body of work I am very proud of. I played with all sorts of things: natural pigment making, textile work, wood and linoleum printmaking, sculpture… but I guess it’s no surprise that I found a round-about way back to drawing and watercolor, my tried and true — but this time drawing WITH watercolor. I developed a technique of building pattern and color by drawing intricate textures with my own recipe of watercolor ink and a dip pen/quill.
Creating art is a strange beast. It is incredibly vulnerable, very public, and also oddly valorized and dismissed all at once. But writing about my process and artwork is what brought it all together for me. I am particularly excited about the development in my writing (and reading) during this experience, something I hope to carry forward.
This was an emotionally significant experience for me. It challenged how I see my self as an artist, as an individual, and as a part of this thing called humanity. All very deep and abstract, woowoo and magical, but it’s how I’ve always thought, and it was validating to be encouraged to go deeper and find a community who thinks that way too. I feel like I jumped in a rabbit hole and now my relationship to the Earth, science, my work and my practice is fundamentally changed… evolved rather.
I am excited to see how this experience manifests itself in how I carry my practice forward. I have a lot of hopes and goals, and a lot of unknowns on my horizon, but I feel much more clear about my point of view, and that is something. My work right now is about pattern and all of its many definitions.
“It’s wondrous mathematical synchronicities, the specifics of it’s chemical analyses, the complexity of it’s physics are beyond both the practical and intuitive knowledge of most lay naturalists (or mystics) no matter how seasoned. When mingled with the wildness of the natural world and the creativity of the human mind, good science reveals its center, its story, its deeper teaching. The science has its own poetic force.”
— Lyanda Lynn Haupt, Rooted
I will share a link to my full thesis paper whenever it goes live in the library repository.
If you are interested in seeing the slides and transcript from my defense presentation or want some reading recommendations just send me an email and I’ll send your way!
This work along with several additional new pieces will be on display at Taylor Books in Charleston, WV February and March 2026. I will send an update with more information about this upcoming show in the next few months. I am really excited to share this work with so many of you, my long-time supporters, back home in my West Virginia.
Stay tuned!