NEVER “THE BODY” BUT
ALWAYS YOURS AND MINE
Melina S.A. Bishop

NEVER “THE BODY” BUT ALWAYS YOURS AND MINE

By Melina Bishop
BFA , Oregon College of Art and Craft 2015

A Thesis Support Paper Submitted in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements of the Degree of Master of Fine Arts

Emily Carr University of Art and Design

TABLE OF CONTENTS

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
ENTRY POINT
THE FORMATION OF MALLEABLE SELFHOOD
NEVER “THE BODY” BUT ALWAYS YOURS AND MINE
THREE ROOMS CAN BE A UNIVERSE: DOMESTIC SPACE AND SOCIAL ISOLATION
DEFINING A MATERIAL VOCABULARY
REMAINING IN DIALOGUE: WHAT DOES THE WORK ASK FOR?
NEVER ALONE: OBJECT KINSHIP
EXIT POINT
WORKS CITED
WORKS CONSULTED

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I acknowledge that this document and all of the artistic work it describes were created on the
unceded territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓ əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱ wú7mesh (Squamish), and Sel̓ íl̓ witulh (TsleilWaututh) Nations where I live and study as an uninvited guest. I wish also to acknowledge that as an
educated, able-bodied, cis-gendered, white woman from the United States I exist inside a network of
societal privileges. Even as I critique, question, and reject the systems that create hierarchy and privilege
in this world I recognize that I continue to benefit from them. I acknowledge also that acknowledgement
is not enough and I must actively deprogram the colonial, capitalist and white-centric narratives that I
have been taught and seek to do the work of this undoing in the world. This is ongoing work that I know I
will do imperfectly but through making, writing and thinking otherwise I will continue in my attempt to
be part of a future that is more equitable and thoughtful than our present.

“If it is a human thing to do to put something you want, because it’s useful, edible or beautiful,
into a bag or a basket or a bit of rolled bark or leaf or a net woven of your own hair or what have
you, and then take it home with you, home being another larger kind of pouch or bag, a container
for people, and then later on you take it out and eat it or share it or store it up for winter in a
solider container or put it in the medicine bundle or the shrine or the museum, the holy place, the
area that contains that which is sacred, and then next day you probably do much the same again
— if to do that is human, if that’s what it takes, then I am a human being after all. Fully, freely,
gladly, for the first time.”

Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction

ENTRY POINT
“And it is the defense of art which gives birth to the odd vision by which something we have
learned to call “form” is separated off from what we have learned to call “content” and to the
well-intentioned move which makes content essential and form accessory.”
Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation
My visual art practice and the written word have long been entangled. I have described my visual
art practice as non-language, as a way to quiet my inner-narrator which has been a fixture in my life since
I started journaling at age ten. I have also described my sculptures as “poems of material language” and to
call particularly well-crafted sentences “language sculptures.” At times I have thought of myself as a
writer that just happens to work mostly in physical forms. Sometimes I am overcome by the shortcomings
of language, turning to sculpture as a form of silent, embodied communication. Despite the various ways
language serves and fails my art practice, the reality remains: the two are inextricability linked.
This piece of writing is not an explanation, interruption or analysis of the body of work it exists
alongside. Rather, I think of it as a supportive creature that nuzzles its head against the leg of the work,
grounding it. It is a document that bears witness to the creation of a family of abstract sculptures; it tells
the story of how they came to be and of how they occupy space, how I think about, with and through
these physical forms. This body of work is sustained by separate but interconnected veins of research. The
stuff of everyday life— observations, mundane occurrences— courses through one vein. The second is
comprised of the material experimentation that takes place when I am actually producing the work. The
third vein is the ingestion of written works of theory and references from other artists, which create the
conceptual underpinnings and contextualization of the physical works. I do not ascribe any sort of
hierarchical value to each, rather they are a cooperative, mutualistic system and are woven together
throughout my making and writing1.
Within this paper I will rub up against concepts of feminist new-materialism, queer theory and
affect theory, pulling out the pieces and parts that are in dialogue with my work. I will engage with the
voices of writers, theorists and artists, both contemporary and historical, but will also insist on leaving
enough room for the objects to speak for themselves. My aim is to peel back layers of the works,
exposing embedded intent and possibilities for meaning-making, thereby providing additional ways to
enter into a relationship with the work.

1This writing style is informed by the creative non-fiction and essay work of Rebecca Solnit, Zadie Smith, Maggie

Nelson and Sheila Heti. Tending to be a hybridization of the personal and public, rooted in specificity while also
reaching towards universals, these writers draw from intimate experience, poetry, theory, philosophy and current
events to create work that often rejects easy classification, which is something I seek in my visual and written work.

A symbiosis exists between what happens in the studio and what happens on the page.
Throughout these past two years I have become increasingly aware of the moments when one leads and
the other follows. After many months of grappling with what felt like a rigid framework of researchbased-art practice—of trying to concoct the right research questions that would provide the impetus for
conceptually-potent work—I realized that for me, the work has to come first. It was only when I reflected
on my artistic process and the sculptures themselves, that I understood which research questions the
sculptures were engaging. These questions included:
How can abstract sculptures evoke ideas of ambiguous embodied identity? Can physical
abstraction work in opposition to rigid and categorical ways of understanding both things and
people?

Can relationships developed between objects (non-human bodies) in space be analogous to
relationships between human bodies? Simultaneously, how does an abstract sculpture function
as a stand-in for a body without being overtly figurative?
What is the significance of the handmade, the three-dimensional and the tactile in an
increasingly digital world?
These queries hint at what is to follow, although I make no promises that definitive answers
will be provided. I can only guarantee possibilities, propositions, potentialities. Through providing
insight into my position as an artist, sharing the works of art and language that I have consumed in this
process and reflecting on the set of actions that generated these sculptures, I hope to create a window, a
hole, a permeable surface that allows the reader to enter into and move through this body of work.

Figure 1, Melina Bishop, Coming Is Also Going (detail) 2020.

THE FORMATION OF MALLEABLE SELFHOOD
“The personal is theoretical. It is often assumed to be abstract: something is more theoretical the
more abstract it is, the more it is abstracted from everyday life… We might then have to drag theory back,
to bring theory back to life.”
Sarah Ahmed, Living a Feminist Life.
While on a macro-scale I am a woman 2 living within patriarchy, the microcosms of my life have
been largely composed of powerful women and feminist men. I was brought up in Louisville, Kentucky3 ,
by a mother and father, neither of whom adhered to or enforced gender norms, rearing my older brother
and me much the same. The network of people that formed me as an individual, predominantly found
through my early education at the Waldorf School of Louisville, are a collection of eccentric, socially and
politically liberal people, some of whom drove me to school in the same bumper-sticker covered VW van
that drove women to the abortion clinic. After my parents’ divorce, my mother started dating women and
years later, I officiated her marriage to my stepmother in the living room of their shared home.
This upbringing and family laid the groundwork for my positionality, as did the body and
circumstance I was born into. Much like my mother, I find my sexuality hard to categorize so I seldom
have tried to do so. I’ve sometimes, tentatively, used terms like bisexual or pansexual or queer4 although I
feel unsure of my place inside any of them. What I know is this: I have fallen in love three times, once
with a man, once with a woman and once with a nonbinary person. My attractions and attachments were
born of specificity, lived experience, and remaining open to the reality of what was occurring within and
around me rather than relying on any theoretical notion I held in my mind about myself. Each of these
relationships shifted my understanding of myself and by extension the work I make as an artist.
My formal education also naturally informs my subjectivity. I have a BFA in Craft with a
concentration in Fibers from a tiny, private fine art school. Within that community, and specifically the
Fibers department, I was once again surrounded predominantly by women. We studied the role of textile
practices in Feminist Art practices, interrogated the “hierarchy of art and craft,” the ways the western
canon sought to bifurcate these practices, subjugating the latter. There I was taught to question these
2

anytime I use the terms woman or feminine they are always used as trans-inclusionary terms that do not refer to
biological sex.
3 The place we refer to as Kentucky is primarily Shawnee, Cherokee, Chickasaw and Osage land.
4 Gordon Hall defines queerness as “an orientation toward ourselves and one another in which we make the bare

minimum of assumptions about the uses and definitions of our own and one another’s bodies and body parts.” (27)
This is the definition I most identify with myself and most closely relates to the way I think through “queerness” in
relationship to my sculptures.

distinctions and to question the gendering of process and medium. I developed a deep-seated appreciation
for functional objects and for the significance of making things by hand. The faculty emphasized the
importance of honoring the history of traditional processes and the wide range of cultures that have
employed them for millennia. At the same time we were encouraged to push back against the idea that
their legacy doesn’t course through the veins of “contemporary art.” Material and process produce
meaning, they are a language of their own that I am inclined to “speak.”
When I was studying Fibers I was introduced to an essay entitled Textures of Memory: The
Poetics of Cloth by curator Pennina Barnett. This piece of writing shifted my way of thinking about the
symbolic power of cloth and how it relates to non-binary modes of thinking. Barnett writes:
What if the poetics of cloth were composed of ‘soft logics’, modes of thought that twist and turn
and stretch and fold? And in this movement new encounters were made, beyond the constraints of
binaries? The binary offers two possibilities, ‘either/or’; ‘soft logics’ offer multiple possibilities.
They are the realm of the “and/and”, where anything can happen. Binaries exclude; ‘soft logics’
are ‘to think without excluding’— yet one is not set against the other, (that would miss the point).
And if ‘soft’ suggests an elastic surface, a tensile quality that yields to pressure, this is not a
weakness; for ‘an object that gives in is actually stronger than one that resists, because it also
permits the opportunity to be oneself in a new way. (26)
Barnett’s concept of “soft logics” resonated so deeply that I felt a sudden clarity around what I was
seeking through my own artistic practice: to physically manifest these malleable modes of thought, to
make objects and spaces that were ripe with “and/and” thinking.
Central to my practice is the soft, the fluid and the undefined. I author objects that are
intentionally difficult to categorize, that make someone think twice, perhaps settling finally for an “and/
and” when an “either/or” is refused. The work asks for people to think with their bodies, feel with their
minds, converse in silent languages. Sometimes the work is slippery. It wants to be felt as it slides through
fingers rather than caught and analyzed. It often pushes up against utilitarianism but then, through
unorthodox material choices and abstraction of form, doesn’t meet expectations.
In this thesis body of work I employ a specific kind of abstraction, tied to a history of female
sculptors, which Jenni Sorkin describes in her essay Five Propositions on Abstract Sculpture as “a
sensitivity to the texture and tactility of objects and a disquieting intensity devoted to the process of
making them.” (141) Sorkin’s essay traces a lineage of female artists working with material and process
in a specific way that was often overlooked, as attention was being drawn to the more overtly-conceptual

forms of critical feminist art. She cites the practices of artists including Lara Schnitger, Jessica
Stockholder and Phyllida Barlow as part of this history of sculptural abstraction and asserts that “its
signature qualities include biomorphism, a roundness that rejects the hard geometries of traditional
minimalism” and “open work—holes, gaps, fissures, loops.” (151) The qualities of my work— including
use of organic shapes, the visual motif of the hole, and the transformation of everyday materials— align
with these characteristics and concerns. I contextualize my own practice as part of this lineage of female
artists.
In my practice I use abstraction to deny literalism and ask for alternative methods of
understanding objects, materials and their relationship to the human. The work encourages the rejection of
assumptions about what an object is or does. Extended further, I strive to create forms that can serve as
tools for fostering the kind of thinking that challenges hierarchical, exclusionary “norms” within society
and culture.

NEVER “THE BODY” BUT ALWAYS YOURS AND MINE
“What would it be to allow a body to be silent, fully present without telling us anything?
Abstraction may be a valuable resource in thinking beyond the terms that are readily available
to us in the present…”
Gordon Hall, Object Lessons
As I turned my attention to understanding how abstract objects can be catalysts for opened-ended
and non-binary modes of thinking, I found my most significant ally and inspiration in Gordon Hall. They
are a sculptor, performer and writer based in New York. Hall is interested in the ways furniture implies a
body, even when one is absent. Therefore their sculptural work tends to reference these functional forms.
To make these sculptures, Hall employs a wide material vocabulary including wood, joint compound,
dyed fabric, colored pencil, carved brick, and cement. They also write extensively about their own
material practice, furniture, minimalist sculpture and gender. Hall, like myself, is invested in the creation
of objects that function as tools for seeing differently and challenging preconceived notions around
embodied identity, including ideas of gender and sexuality.
Often an exhibition of
Hall’s sculptural objects, such as
The Number of Inches Between
Them at MIT List Visual Arts
Center (Figure 2), is also
accompanied by several
performances in which the
sculptures are activated by bodies.
Hall explains this process as the
opposite of the traditional
performer/prop relationship: the
physical work comes first and the
actions and interactions are made in
response to the object. Hall

Figure 2, Gordon Hall, The Number of Inches Between Them, 2017.
*Image removed due to copyright restrictions*

describes their sculptures as
“extremely precise objects of ambiguous use” (“Object Lessons” 15) and these interactions serve as
opportunities for offering possible, perhaps unconventional “uses.” While I do not perform with the
objects I make, I am interested in the ways my sculptures choreograph people’s movements through space
and, like Hall, my work often implies a possible utility that is unclear or unassigned.

Figure 3, Melina Bishop, What Are You If You Are
Not Holding? (side 1), 2020

Figure 4, Melina Bishop, What Are You If You Are
Not Holding? (side 2), 2020

One of the works from my thesis which possesses distinct furniture-like qualities and strives to
encourage movement from its audience is What Are You If You Are Not Holding? (Figure 3-4). Formally,
the piece has a clear relationship to a shelf. I constructed this work from insulation foam, papier-mâché,
Hydrocal, cotton bed sheets and house paint5. When building the form, I placed two sheets of four-foot
tall foam beside one another and cut three circles along the line where they met. Standing the sheets
upright, I connected them at a ninety-degree angle to create a corner. I then attached the six half-circles
that I had cut out to each side of the structure, four protruding from one side and two from the other.
Using a light purple house paint with a semi-gloss finish, I gave one side of the structure a thick skin. On
the other side I applied the same pigment mixed with Hydrocal, creating a chalky finish. The slick, shiny
side of the form functions as a shell while the soft side is a vulnerable underbelly—a creature standing on
its hind-legs. Although the changes in hue and texture are subtle, they are meant to create a relationship
between interiority and exteriority. As the form appears different depending on the angle from which it is

5 See DEFINING A MATERIAL VOCABULARY section for further discussion of material choices.

seen, it invites those who encounter it to circle around it, getting close to look through the windows,
crouching down to see the texture-variance in the object’s feet.
The title of this work, What Are You If You Are Not Holding?, references the assumed utility of
this structure and the pervasive desire to assign it to the category of shelf. With this piece I seek to trouble
an instinct to project our own assumptions onto objects. I have repeatedly been told by audience members
that they want objects on the “shelves” or that the link between this structure and something found in a
domestic space makes them less inclined to spend time with it as a sculpture. This reaction and set of
expectations is precisely what intrigues me. When an object is mentally assigned to the role of “support
structure” it calls into question its value, meaning and agency. By placing this object “empty,” in a gallery
space I am attempting to push back against hierarchical ways of thinking. While I do not reject the idea
that this form could live another life as a shelf in a domestic space6 here it exists as a sculpture. I am
asking the audience to see it for what it is. Extending this logic from the non-human to the human, I
intend it to serve as a reminder to viewers to interact with other human beings not based on our
assumptions or preconceived notions but with an open-minded understanding of their specificity.
This determination to assert the value and intellectually-potent potential of the undefinable,
impractical or hard-to-place thing is as essential to Hall as it is to me. In “Object Lessons: Thinking
Gender Variance through Minimalist Sculpture,” Hall makes a clear argument for how abstract sculptures
can be used as tools for reforming the way we experience and understand gender, “not primarily because
of what we see in the sculptures, but because of how they might enable us to see everything else.” (23)
Within this essay Hall pushes back against the notion that queer art must have a certain representational
and/or explicit quality. They refer to the idea of blankness in minimalist art, relating it to a denial of
“legible self-identification.” (23)
While writing about objects that do not have to justify or explain themselves, Hall quotes Jan
Verwoert’s “Exhaustion and Exuberance”, stating that “the insistence to speak—or make work in any
other way—about that which is neither readily understandable nor immediately useful is in itself a strong
claim to agency: I Can speak or make work about what I Can’t speak or make work about.” (24) This
reinforces the idea that a meaningful kind of assertion is made when an art work doesn’t comply or
conform to external expectations of it. It also emphasizes the significance of the non-literal and the
moments where what needs to be said extends beyond the limits of language.

6 to have a fixed conception of this object as “non-utilitarian”

modes of thinking.

runs contrary to the idea of flexible, non-binary

After years of speaking of my work as related to “the body,” it was only through reading Hall’s
text “Why I Don’t Talk About ‘The Body’: A Polemic” that I realized the problematic nature of the term,
used widely in artistic contexts. Hall explains that they have intentionally rejected this wording for
reasons including that “it generalizes across bodily difference” and implies that there could exist “one
body as a stand-in for all of us.” (96) The consequence of attempting to construct, through language, some
sort of “neutral” body is that an automatic set of assumptions around that body’s abilities, shape, gender,
sexuality, race, class are likely to occur. Hall writes: “This body is not in a wheelchair, not deaf, not blind,
not autistic, not ill, not high, not any of the other endless ways that our bodies and senses deviate from a
normalizing standard,” (96). Offered as an alternative, the term bodies, unlike the body, is a plural that has
space within it for both specificity and multiplicity.
This piece of writing led me to change the language I use, eliminating “the body” from my
vocabulary. It also made me ask myself: when I talk about “bodies,”7 in the context of my own practice,
whose “bodies” am I actually referring to? I posed this question to myself not to solve the issues Hall
critiques in their polemic, but rather to gain clarity about the specific bodily relationships that my work
evokes. The answer I came up with was: yours and mine. By yours, I refer to a viewer, someone who
sensorily encounters the sculptures, the embodied consciousnesses that these physical objects come into
contact with8. It is specific in that it is speaking only of you and whatever uniquely beautiful flesh-vessel
you inhabit. Yet it is general in that there are so many possible yous. I may not know who you are and
indeed we might only know each other through the work that serves as mediator, a conduit that somehow
connects us. You might find the work beautiful or repulsive, engaging or trite. Regardless, you enter into
an engagement with the work and now the work is about you, for you.
By mine, I refer to my own body because all the sculptures were made with my body, and
therefore they will always be entangled with my physical self. There are traces of my body on the used
bedsheets that were made into plaster cloth. Hardened evidence of my hands smearing one material onto
another, fingerprints in clay, can be seen on their surfaces. Throughout the making process I was on, in,
under, beside these sculptures, understanding them through touch and feel before attempting to even
approach them with language or reason. Some I’ve cradled and caressed like precious young creatures.
Some I have draped my body over, slipped my limbs into, felt myself embraced by.

7 It is important to note that I do not subscribe to Cartesian dualism or believe in a mind-body split, therefore when I

make reference to “bodies” this in no way excludes consciousness, personality, affect or spirit, it simply refers to
them as embodied within materiality.

I recognize that when the work is installed in this institutional context that the viewership is limited and that the
art still remains largely inaccessible to a varied audience. This is an ongoing issue that limits the sorts of “bodies”
that constitute the “you” I write of here but I hope that in future contexts a wider viewership will be possible.
8

I produced these objects and poured into them all the physical affection, maternal energy and
longing that I had built up inside of me. Their forms are care-full9 and the actions required of my body to
make them kept me grounded in a time of profound loneliness. In the physical absence of a partner, a
lover, a family, a child or a pet, these inanimate objects were given all of my displaced tenderness. By
sharing them with an audience it is my intention to bring viewers into relationship with myself and these
non-human bodies. The affect the objects are imbued with functions as a bridge between you and me.
This interdependent and non-hierarchical way of relating artist, audience and object places each
one beside the other. Besides, as Eve Sedgwick states in Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy,
Performativity, “permits a spacious agnosticism about several of the linear logics that encore dualistic
thinking.” This makes beside a preposition that is consistent with the intentions of the work. Each
element, human or non-human, is part of a system of relations. Meaning is not made by any one entity
alone but rather it is generated by the convergence of actants. Therefore, as this work engages with bodies
— yours and mine—an ever-growing, ever-shifting mesh of encounters and entanglements emerges.

9 term borrowed from Cathy Wilkes’ care-full matter-scapes: female affects of care, feminist materiality and vibrant

things by Basia Sliwinska

THREE ROOMS CAN BE A UNIVERSE:
DOMESTIC SPACE AND SOCIAL ISOLATION
“The “here” of the body does not simply refer to the body, but to “where” the body dwells. The
“here” of bodily dwelling is thus what takes the body outside of itself, as it is affected and shaped by its
surroundings: the skin that seems to contain the body is also where the atmosphere creates an
impression.”
Sarah Ahmed, Queer Phenomenology
Works of art have a way of marking time, of bearing witness to a specific moment and of
betraying little truths about an artist’s life that sometimes they themselves don’t realize the pieces knew.
This collection of sculptures was produced almost entirely in the year 2020 and while they are not
“about” the global events that were taking place and the reverberations felt inside my own life, the
consequences—material, psychological, philosophical— of being made in this time are present in the
objects. The artworks were made not “about” but “through” a global pandemic, Black Lives Matter
protests, an American presidential election, periods of complete social isolation, and myriad small
personal crises. These conditions informed what I made, how I lived and how I thought so completely that
all physical byproducts of this time are informed by this context and the personal and observational
research that took place.
In March of 2020, as the first of the COVID-19 lockdowns began, I wrote in my journal:
“I say I live alone but I am reconsidering. Fruit, flowers, objects, plants. They are my company
and my muses these days. I am not the first to realize that three rooms can be a universe but how many of
us forgot? Small things are amplified and I am paying close attention,” followed by a list of things that I
was thinking about which included:
Images of connective tissue
A reimagining of what the term “Still Life” means right now
A photo I took 11 months ago of a marble statue’s hand on its own arm
The outline of a body in the fetal position
The way the line between cooking and making art starts to blur
when your kitchen is used as a studio
The idea of nourishment, the idea of what is “essential”
The sensation of touching something through latex gloves: mediated touch
A quiet sense of resolve to be very gentle with oneself

Figure 5, Kitchen-Studio, April 2020.

Figure 6, Kitchen-Studio, February 2021.

That quiet sense of resolve to be very gentle with myself remained intact in the weeks and
months that followed that initial halt which had suddenly shaken all sense of “normalcy” and drastically
shifted my lifestyle. After a year of driving back and forth to Portland twice a month, trying to sustain a
long distance relationship that had just ended, after the two years of constant work-travel that had come
before beginning graduate school, I was all in one place. Being constantly in motion, spread across the
United States, sleeping in more than 50 different beds a year, and then split between two cities, always
feeling the need to be somewhere else, had bound me up in some invisible knots that I only really became
aware of when they were released.
Less than a month before the first period of social isolation began here in Vancouver I had
moved from the most dismal place I had ever lived— a small, tan room that hardly saw the light of day,
had kitchen appliances along one wall and a shared bathroom that always smelled like artificial raspberry
body-spray and marijuana— to the first place that has ever felt like a true home of my own. My new
apartment was light-filled, with six bay windows, and a sky light above the shower. After many years of
living with roommates I finally had a bathroom and a kitchen all my own and it felt like a much
appreciated luxury. I spent that February painting every room in a fresh coat of white and cleaning the
space, transforming it into a personal sanctuary. My sensitivity towards and concern for interior spaces
has always been strong, for, as Sara Ahmed states in her book Queer Phenomenology “spaces are not

exterior to bodies; instead spaces are like a second skin that unfolds in the folds of the body.” (9) The
more I feel at home in a space, the clearer my mind, the more at ease I am in my body.
This change in residence and the subsequent pause that took place in response to the pandemic
impacted my personal, emotional life and therefore, my art practice. In fact, this shift acted as a pivotal
moment for the development of this thesis body of work. While the outside world began to make less
sense to me and uncertainty seemed to reign supreme, art making started to come more naturally. I felt the
obligation for the work to make sense had lifted and therefore it was given the freedom to emerge, using it
as a method of processing my experience. For me, the act of making work functions as a coping
mechanism and a mental release. In Ann Cvetkovich’s book Depression: A Public Feeling she describes
the way that making things with one’s hands “fosters ways of being in the world in which the body moves
the mind rather than the other way around, or in which, echoing neurobiological views in another register,
body and mind are deeply enmeshed or holistically connected” which reinforces my own experience of
the significance of making (168). The author goes further to frame the positive feelings that are generated
by acts of creation as an antidote to depression and anxiety.
Cvetkovich defines domestic spaces as the “humble material locations” where negative affect
“can be transformed through practices that can become the microclimate of hope” (155). While working
from home, I felt the lines between my domestic life and my studio practice blur, so much so that even
after regaining access to my studio on campus in late August, my apartment’s kitchen remained my
primary site of production. Materials and tools are stored in cabinets beside pots and pans. The cutting of
foam, the cutting of fruit, the mixing of plaster, the mixing of batter: each process is as valid and
meaningful as the next, each with its own sensory responses. They all serve as part of this “art of daily
living” that Cvetkovich cites in this text as one possible “cure” for negative feelings (161). My sculptural
works have taken up residence with me, keeping my body and mind active, providing me company in a
season of solitude. Inevitably, feelings of anxiety, sadness and fear, caused by what is happening in the
world beyond, have seeped in. Yet in the microcosm of these three rooms, a utopia of everyday habit
(159) of my own construction, I find solace in the processes that make something out of them, providing
me with the means to work through this time in human history.

DEFINING A MATERIAL VOCABULARY
“If agency is not a property solely invested in human-subjects but an action whose effects yield
whatever sense we have of subjects and objects (human and otherwise) then, arguably, both subjects and
objects are vital and redolent with potential, but to neither can be ascribed a fixed identity or intention
(beyond the sense of intentionality as ‘being directed towards’).
Marsha Meskimmon, Art Matters.
The fact that my thesis body of work began to unfurl during this time of confinement and that the
works originated in my domestic space informed the specific material vocabulary used for these
sculptures. As artist Nancy Lupo states in an interview for the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego
blog, “material is a way of making sense. It is language, although it unfolds differently and has color and
weight and texture.” The way I employ and manipulate specific materials throughout this collection of
work has an internal logic and these decisions have specific meanings for me as an artist, but, as Lupo
says “let’s not take meaning for granted. Let’s not pretend it’s shared.” Lupo reminds us that meaning is
mutable and subjective. What means something quite specific to me might be evocative of something
quite different to another. So while it is helpful to share the ideas I associate with these materials, I
recognize the fact that these “meanings” are not fixed and will not always be fully legible. I think of
materials as their own language which communicates differently depending on the viewer and can never
be fully translated into verbal language. Therefore I provide these definitions not to ascribe meaning but
to speak to my associations and intentions.
From a practical perspective, working from the limited space of my apartment’s kitchen, meant
that I turned to materials that fit within that sphere, not only in terms of scale but also toxicity and
accessibility. A certain attitude of resourcefulness and self-sufficiency, a central tenet of feminist art
practice which already existed within my practice, became heightened. I worked with what I had and what
I could find, seeking to do what Lucy Lippard refers to as “making something out of nothing.” (97) Prior
to the pandemic I had been convinced I needed to find ways to work with cutting-edge technologies and
new digital tools to keep my artistic practice relevant in an increasingly digital world. When I was limited
by a lack of access to these resources I felt profound relief. Simple hand tools, similar to what already
exist in a kitchen, and a humble assortment of materials was all that I needed for this body of work.
Plaster is a key component in many of my sculptures. It has connections to architecture and the
construction of domestic spaces as well as to the provisional maquette used in sculpture. Commonly,
plaster is a step in a process: a mold for casting, a model for something that will be carved from stone.
Often it plays its role yet never shows up in a finished product. It is cheap, light and fragile. These
qualities are precisely what made it ideal for this work. I was striving to use materials that are accessible

and that have peripheral roles in sculpture
history. Also, I am compelled by the poetics of
the way that plaster transforms as it sets: the
fluid and malleable giving way to the stable and
strong. I intentionally use the plaster in multiple
stages of its “life,” sometimes casting it while
it’s still liquid or pouring it over a surface,
sometimes rubbing it onto a form when it’s
thicker, the consistency of joint compound,
then building with it when it gets thick and
lumpy. Even the dried-up remnants are saved
and reintegrated into future works.
When I use plaster-cloth— which I
make by soaking strips of cotton bedsheets in
plaster—I associate it with casts applied to
broken bones. I think of applying the cloth as
“setting the bones” of the sculptural form,
giving it strength. I broke my arm for the first
time at 14 months old, falling off a chair. My
mother still has the tiny cast that helped me
heal, tucked away with other sentimental

Figure 7, Collected Materials, 2020.

objects. I have thought about this specific chunk
of plaster-cloth, yellowed and old, with an intimate knowledge of my body, many times as I have wrapped
my forms. Yet while a cast on a human is a temporary shell, for my sculptures it’s a lasting part of the
body, a protection that is never removed, always holding the thing together.
The use of bedsheets is significant to me because it imbues my objects with traces of the
relationship between cloth and body. The “soft logics” (Barnett 25) of fabric remain essential to my
practice, even as I have moved away from traditional textile techniques. By including this material these
concepts are still embedded into my sculptures’ rigid structures. When my sheets (or sometimes
pillowcases or duvet covers) become threadbare, ripped or extremely stained, they get cut up into strips
and used for sculptures. This decision also relates to a general commitment to reuse and a desire to
transform what might be defined as “trash” into something new with its own worth and is connected to a
long history of mending and repair practiced by female textile artists and artisans for generations.

Foam is also an essential element of my material vocabulary. I am fascinated with its
contradictory qualities. It is thought of as temporal and disposable but in actuality its inability to
biodegrade renders it eternal, in its own problematic way. Throughout sculpture history, materials like
stone and bronze have occupied a primary position, in part because their inherent weight and strength
allows them to withstand time. In contrast, expanded polystyrene 10 is most often used temporarily: as
packing peanuts, as “disposable” plates, as egg cartons. Foam is light, cheap and therefore has little
monetary “value” which has led to it being used in these short-lived applications and then rapidly
discarded. It ends up in landfills and waterways where it continues to exist, broken and weathered yet still
unable to decompose. While I do not think that I am “solving the problem” of foam polluting our planet
by repurposing discarded pieces of it in my sculptures 11, I do strive to reframe the material and accentuate
its potential. By using foam in my sculptures, I am assigning it value and giving it a new life where its
lastingness has new meaning.
I use the process of papier-mâché as another method of transforming everyday materials into
objects with personality and agency. While the process has many applications, it is commonly associated
with children’s crafts, costume making and DIY home-decor projects. I employ papier-mâché precisely
because of these associations and use it to create abstract fine-art objects that function in the gallery much
like a marble carving or chunk of cast bronze. This is not meant as a way of emulating another material,
but rather a way to assert the agency and potency of papier-mâché, giving it a seat at the proverbial table.
I use many layers of papier-mâché to coat the exterior of a mesh form and then extract the mesh, leaving a
hollow shell. I think of this method as creating a thick skin, a membrane that can function on its own. The
thick skin I create is connected to themes of resilience and unexpected strength which reoccur throughout
this body of work.
I introduced house paint into my material repertoire after a struggle to understand the role of color
in my practice. Prior to graduate school I had been using a predominately “neutral”12 color-palette for
many years. While I had conceptual rationales for this in the past, it was clear to me that they no longer
applied and that redefining my relationship to pigment was necessary. I settled on using pastel colors for
this body of work because of their predominant cultural connotations. Light tints are often associated with
softness, femininity and infancy. Many of the colors have been culturally gendered: light greens and blues
10 often incorrectly called Styrofoam which actually refers to a trademarked version of extruded polystyrene. Some

of the larger pieces in this body of work were made from insulation foam which is extruded polystyrene (which I
associate with interiority, domestic space and architecture).

11 I understand that as an artist and as a human being in Western society I am constantly participating in systems of

consumption and use that are causing ecological harm.

12 I used this term to as it commonly refers to colors including white, black, grey and tan. Yet I put it in quotes to

acknowledge that, culturally speaking, colors are never actually “neutral.”.

as male, light pinks and purples as female. I use these colors not to perpetuate gendered associations but
rather to challenge them. By applying them to un-gendered objects that celebrate and/and thinking and
ambiguity, I seek to free the colors from binaries. Additionally, I paid attention to all the places in
everyday life where these colors appear in ways unrelated to imposed cultural constraints— the pale pink
of oyster mushrooms, the minty green of toothpaste— and allowed these to inform my choices.
House paint made the most sense to me as a method of applying these pigments because of its
connection to domestic space. Given that these works emerged from the home, choosing a material
readily associated with refreshing a grimy bathroom
felt conceptually potent. Practically speaking, I use
the semi-gloss house paint to seal the plaster and
sculpting compound in, creating a skin for the
sculpture. The subtle shine of the paint contrasts the
gloppy and unrefined textures in the plaster work. In
several pieces I applied the paint thickly and allowed
it to drip or ooze over a surface. I associate this with
bodily excretions and the material manifestation of
fluidity.
This material vocabulary is also informed by
researching other artists’ practices. I have learned
from the way contemporary and historical figures in
the field work with specific materials. Phyllida
Barlow, who Robert Enright describes as “a material
magician, the consummate alchemist of
stuff,” (Enright) helped set a precedent for the kind of
sculptural practice that I have today. Barlow uses
humble materials including (but not at all limited to)

Figure 8, Phyllida Barlow, untitled: badplace; 2020
lockdown 4, 2020. *Image removed due to copyright
restrictions*

foam, plaster, papier-mâché, and discarded textiles to
make both discrete sculptures and massive, experiential installations. Her work is concerned with the
lively relationship between object and viewer, creating bodily engagement with her audience members
and reimagining everyday materials in compelling yet playful ways. These conceptual concerns, which
are tied up in her material choices, are closely aligned with my own and I contextualize my practice
within her artistic lineage.

REMAINING IN DIALOGUE: WHAT DOES THE WORK ASK FOR?
“Only joyful discoveries count.
If you are not making them you are not moving.”
Agnes Martin, Writings
Many months ago, while working in the kitchen-studio, halfway through a process, I stopped
to scribble down in all caps on a messy scrap of paper: THE WORK WILL ALWAYS SERVE THE WORK.
I meant this as a declarative reminder to myself that every new piece is born from the remnants and
lessons of its predecessors. When I start a piece and enter a dialogue with a material—whether it is foam,
fabric, papier-mâché, clay — I am building on previous experiential knowledge of the material and
building towards an even more thorough understanding of its formal and conceptual potentials. Often
elements of previously “finished”13 work becomes incorporated into current projects as new potential is
realized. This rejection of fixed roles or definitions is, as Barnett writes, “the opportunity to become
oneself in a new way.”
I have accumulated certain abilities and sensibilities over time that I store somewhere between
my hands and my brain which I rely on to conduct studio-based research. I start a piece with very little
preconceived notion or plan and instead allow my intuition to lead. This is a way of working that Rachel
Jones, in her essay On Not Knowing, correlates with the Kantian conception of artistic “genius.” While I
am not making an argument in favor of the term “genius,” the relationship between knowing and not
knowing, articulated here by Jones, is very much related to how I conduct process-based research.
Jones explains further that “while the artist is unable to use concepts or rules to fully
determine what will emerge from their creative activities, for these to be productive of more than mere
nonsense, they must nonetheless draw on other kinds of knowledge. This includes the technical
knowledge or skills required to work with their materials as well as knowledge of preceding aesthetic
traditions” (2). My intuitive and often playful process relies on a form of tacit knowledge that has been
absorbed by my body and consciousness; a way of knowing that cooperates with “not knowing.”
In her essay Art Matters: Feminist Corporeal-Materialist Aesthetics, Marsha Meskimmon
emphasizes the significant interdependence of artist and materials and the emergent nature of meaningmaking within an art practice. While the author broadly addresses relationships between corporeal
feminisms and “new” materialisms, she also writes specifically of artistic production stating:

13 I don’t believe that anything is ever truly finished

making art, therefore, need not be understood as the activity of a fully intentional ‘artistsubject’ expressing pre-formed meanings in and through a selection of mute materials with pregiven properties but instead as one kind of intra-action through which the ‘artwork’ and the
‘artist’ both emerge as entities by means of effecting a specific (local) agential cut – by the act or
process of ‘making art.’ (364)
In this excerpt, Meskimmon proposes that art exists at an intersection between artist and material with
neither superseding the other in terms of agency.

Figure 9, Melina Bishop, Outside My Window Two Pigeons
Were Born, 2020.

Figure 10, Melina Bishop, Outside My Window Two Pigeons
Were Born (detail), 2020.

My sculpture Outside My Window Two Pigeons Were Born (Figure 8) is an example of how I
work with the unknown and remain in conversation with my materials. This piece is composed of organic
shapes and protrusions, compiled into a singular form with a base that sits atop a sculptural plinth.
Depending on the angle from which it is viewed the piece appears different and new shapes are revealed
(Figure 9). Wires, wrapped in cloth, come out from the solid form in several places, creating lines in space

that then connect back to the body of the sculpture. The internal structure of the work was made with
wooden dowel, foam, and caulk and the surfaces were coated in plaster, paper clay or sculpting
compound. While I left most of the surfaces raw and untreated, I treated some portions, including the wire
portions, with a grey, semi-gloss house paint.
This work is a manifestation of material experimentation and “formal play.” While using plaster
for a previous piece, the material started to set. Rather than waste it, I used it to stand a dowel upright. I
then took a pile of off-cut pieces of foam, left from other works, and started attaching them provisionally
to the upright dowel, responding to the shapes and the way they integrated with one another. When I was
satisfied with the arrangement, I attached the pieces and began covering the surfaces to conceal the foam,
provide textual variance and give the piece structural integrity. Finally, I used the paint to highlight select
portions of the form and provide subtle variety in coloration.

Figure 11, Cy Twombly, Untitled, 2009. *Image removed due to
copyright restrictions*

Figure 12, Constantin Brâncuși Maiastra.
1910-12. *Image removed due to copyright
restrictions*

Figuring out what a work is asking for once it is made and responding accordingly is central to
my studio process. Once Outside My Window Two Pigeons Were Born had lived on many surfaces,
including a kitchen countertop, a desk, a bookshelf and a standard plinth it became clear that it needed its
own support system. I set out to construct a display mechanism that functioned as a continuation of the
sculpture itself, following in the foot-steps of sculptors including Cy Twombly (Figure 10) and Constantin
Brâncuși (Figure 11). Both of these major figures in sculpture history played a role in shifting the
relationship between an art object and its support. So, while the decision to create this structure was based
on what I felt the work was “asking for” it is also informed by this art historical precedent.
The construction of the “plinth” was a material experiment and technical challenge. I sought to
make something with the capabilities of furniture but using easily-accessible materials and processes. I
adhered two cardboard boxes to each other, slightly askew. I lined the inside of the top box with
insulation foam to make it more structurally sound and then coated both in several coats of papier-mâché
and plaster cloth. I cut soft rectangles into the bottom box and oblong “windows” into several sides. Then
I worked additively, adhering foam shapes to the exterior of the form and covering their surfaces in
plaster of various consistencies. Finally, I
created a small plateau on the top of the plinth
for the sculpture to rest on and added little
plaster feet which I had cast from a Styrofoam
egg carton.
While the two components of this work
were conceived separately, they have become
two parts of one whole. They were produced
using many of the same processes and speak the
same material language. Therefore their formal
relationship and physical reliance on each other
creates a self-contained system. I titled the piece
Outside My Window Two Pigeons Were Born,
upon completion. It is a literal statement of fact:
at the time this sculpture was being made, in a
nest on the ledge outside my bedroom window,
two pigeons hatched. As small, domestic
realities are often embedded into my work, it
made sense to me that this sculpture would
serve as a micro-monument for a seemingly-

Figure 13, Arlene Shechet Above and Beyond, 2015. *Image
removed due to copyright restrictions*

mundane occurrence that involved birthing (the maternal), the growth of non-human bodies and the
relationship between the interior and exterior of a domestic space. Suddenly, after being named, the grey
details alluded to a pigeon’s coloration, the arching forms to wings, the knobby protrusions to beaks. To
me, the two interdependent parts of the work felt akin to the avian siblings: caring for each other, keeping
one another company, becoming themselves in tandem.
In addition to being informed by Constantin Brâncuși and Cy Twombly, this work also relates to
the practice of New York-based artist, Arlene Shechet. Shechet is invested in employing the plinth or
support system as a portion of the overall sculpture, as can be seen in her piece Above and Beyond (Figure
13). She employs forms that evoke ideas of both the bodily and the architectural, pairing materials with
contrasting characteristics within singular works.
Although it is these formal qualities of her finished work that I connect most strongly to my own
work, it is the way she articulates her process that makes me feel the strongest kinship with her. In an
interview with Merrell Hambleton in New York Times Magazine, she described her creative work as
something that doesn’t start or stop: “it’s a river or a lake and I swim in it” (qtd. in Hambleton). She uses
the words “play,” “dialogue,” “listening,” and “paying attention” to describe the way that she relates to
her own sculptures as she makes them. These are all words central to how I describe the forces animating
my own practice. Shechet explains that for her work there is “absolutely no formula” and that she starts a
piece without knowing where it will go, working and playing with it until it “speaks to” her.
The way Shechet describes her process and being in conversation with lively-though-inanimate
materials is significant and ties into my own method of making. Within my studio I use formal play,
working with and through the unknown, and listening to what the work is asking for as tools for
experimental knowledge creation. All the byproducts form a system of relations: they are descendants of
the works that came before and ancestors of the works yet to be made.

NEVER ALONE: OBJECT KINSHIP
“Such a newfound attentiveness to matter and its powers will not solve the problem of human
exploitation or oppression but it can inspire a greater sense of the extent to which all bodies are
kin in the sense of inextricably enmeshed in a dense network of relations.”
Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter

Figure 14, Melina Bishop, Never Alone (install), 2020.

The fact that I habitually think of my works as related to one another in a familial way— as
descendants and ancestors— led me to conceptualize my ever-growing collection of related sculpture as
an inanimate “family.”14 I produced individual works with a shared formal and material vocabulary over
the duration of the last nine months, without preconceived notions of their final presentation. Never Alone
(Figure 14) is an installation of seven of these sculptures, arranged together as an assemblage15.

14 My use of the term “family” doesn’t refer to heteronormative, genetic or biological relations. As Maggie Nelson

writes in her book The Argonauts there is a “long history of queers constructing their own families” and that
“nothing we do in life need have a lid crammed on it, that no one set of practices or relations has the monopoly on
the so-called radical or the so-called normative.” (72-73)
15 While I acknowledge that “assemblage” has a separate definition within art, here I am using this word in the

specific way Jane Bennett employs it in Vibrant Matter: “ad hoc groupings of diverse elements, of vibrant materials
of all sorts.”

While the sculptures might be central to the assemblage, the human bodies that encounter the
works and move through the space, the architecture, the light filtered through the surrounding windows,
the air contained within the walls are all also actants, part of the collaborative whole of the experience.
As Jane Bennett articulates in her book Vibrant Matter,“an actant never really acts alone. Its efficacy or
agency always depends on the collaboration, cooperation, or interactive interference of many bodies and
forces.” I intend Never Alone to draw attention to the relationships that exist between the animate and
inanimate16
The title of the installation— Never Alone— makes reference to the Jane Bennett excerpt and to
the dire need for connectivity, mutual-aid and care within a historical moment that is largely defined by
physical distance, social isolation and political turmoil. It also refers to the idea that even when
geographically separated from those we are emotionally intertwined with, we never cease belonging to an
invisible mesh of connection and support. While each individual piece occupies its own space, I carefully
oriented the works to be in conversation, engaging one another from different parts of the room. This

Figure 15, Melina Bishop, Never Alone, 2020.

16 this includes: human to human, object to object, human to object

Figure 16, Melina Bishop, Self-Support, 2020.

positioning allows the works to be self-sufficient yet in relationship; standing on their own and yet
longing for one another.
Several individual pieces are themselves comprised of multiple interdependent parts. Self-Support
(Figure 16) is a pair of papier-mâché amorphous lumps, one of which is perched atop the other. They are
both created using the same internal form and are nearly the same shape but with subtle variations. I think
of these as symbols of two different versions of a “self.” They are each painted with layers of semi-gloss
acrylic house paint—light purple-grey on the bottom, light pink on top— which obscures their materiality
and renders their weight and strength ambiguous. I consider these lumps (which appear elsewhere in the
overall collection of thesis works) as non-figurative bodies. In the specific iteration of these forms that is
Self-Support, one version of the “self” props up or holds the other up, physically mimicking the mental
and emotional mechanisms of care and coping that can take place within someone during extended
periods of isolation.
Hold Up, Cling To (Figure 17) is another work from the installation that is a system of contingent
parts. This piece alludes to a table in form and scale. It is made of a sheet of perforated steel held up by
two free-standing “legs,” and a sculptural support. The legs are constructed from cardboard tubing,
plaster-cloth and plaster while the base is made of insulation form, coated in joint compound. On one
edge of the metal surface there is a pink and white sculptural object half resting-on and half falling-off the

Figure 17, Melina Bishop, Hold Up, Cling To, 2020.

“table.” The object itself has six large holes in its surface and one half-circular lump protruding from the
center of the portion that rests on the steel. On the other side of the “table” is another imperfect and
textured half-orb from the bottom of which runs a long, white, cloth-wrapped wire ending in a small
“foot” on the sculptural base.
An assemblage of its own, Hold Up, Cling To, uses the language of contingency, reliance and
interconnectivity to speak of objects existing in a network of relations. The steel sheet depends on the legs
to hold it, the legs depend on one another, the objects on the surface depend on the support-structure as a
whole. The cord that connects the base to the object on the surface is meant to symbolize an umbilical
cord or a power cord: something bringing life-force or energy from one thing to another. The relationship
between the two lumpy half-orbs on the surface of the “table” gives the impression that the white form is
trying to traverse the table to get back to its pink sibling.
I see a connection between Hold Up, Cling To and Eva Hesse’s earlier works in my use of bodily,
textured lumps and cloth-wrapped cords. Hesse is a foundational influence for my practice. Early on in
my undergraduate education I experienced an exhibition of her Studio Works which contributed to my
desire to work in sculpture. Often, when reflecting on my work, I can see her impact on me, even if only
in subtle material decisions. This functions as a reminder that as an artist I am also interdependent and
enmeshed in a “family” of artists that paved the way for my practice, teaching me through their work.
In addition, one of the most prominent influences for Never Alone was contemporary artist Nairy
Baghramian. Iranian-born but living in Berlin, Baghramian works in sculpture, drawing and photography.
Broadly speaking, her work relates to relationships between architecture, everyday objects and the human
body. Many of the works have an abstracted relationship with human anatomy. Yet, as Paulina Pobocha
observes in an interview for Ocula Magazine Baghramian’s sculptures “not only resemble bodies,
however—they also behave like bodies. Their individual elements work together like anatomical systems
—propping up, supporting, and sustaining each other.” This interconnectivity present in Baghramian’s
work is one of the aspects that has informed my own practice and specifically Never Alone.
I first encountered Baghramian work at Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 2017
during the run of her exhibition Déformation Professionnelle (Figure 18). I had a strong visceral and
emotional response to these sculptures, feeling their presence as abstract figures occupying physical space
with me. I felt both confronted and comforted by these inanimate bodies. The way some of her forms held
each other created a sense of intimacy. The way some seemed to be reaching out inspired a feeling of
longing. Upon reflecting on Baghramian’s exhibition and my encounter with it, I realized then that I

wanted to redefine the scale and installation of my work so that I could create similar embodied
experiences for viewers.
As my collection of sculptures continues to grow, I will create other assemblage-style
installations akin to Never Alone. For my final exhibition of thesis works, I intend to employ a similar
logic to curate and arrange a portion of the overall “family” of sculptures within the space of the gallery.
While specific characters included in Never Alone will make an appearance, their relations and
orientations will be different, thereby creating new dialogues. In many ways, I consider this project not to
be fixed. I think of my creative production as a run-on sentence: ongoing without an end in sight.
Therefore these moments of exhibition are not periods, denoting finality, but commas. In other words,
moments of breath that always lead to something more.

Figure 18, Nairy Baghramian, Déformation Professionnelle, 2017.*Image removed due to copyright restrictions*

EXIT POINT
At the onset of this paper I said that likely no definitive answers would be found within these
pages, but you were promised possibilities, propositions, potentialities. I hope that through the sharing of
my personal context, the nature of my artistic process, and the multiple veins of research that maintain
this body of work, that I have delivered on that promise. Yet it is also my hope that within the dialogue
between the sculptures and this text, I have left space for the physical pieces to have their own voice.
Sometimes the exit point is the same as the entrance: we loop our way around and crawl back out
the same window we came in through. This may leave us ready to enter something new, to slip in through
a different hole. I believe there is always more than one way to come and go, countless ways to be inside
of something. Like my sculptures, I intend for my writing to be porous, to have space inside of it for us to
move and breathe. I like to think, whether built with material or with words, that a work is never truly
finished, just resting. Ideas grow, morph, reproduce or swallow themselves whole. Therefore even as I
close this document I assure you, there are other openings.

Figure 19, Melina Bishop, Coming Is Also Going (detail) 2020.

WORKS CITED
Ahmed, Sara. Living a Feminist Life. Zubaan, 2019.
Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Duke University Press, 2006.
Barnett, Pennina. Textures of Memory: The Poetics of Cloth. Angel Row Gallery, 1999.
Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, 2010.
Enright, Robert. “All Sorts of Things That Are Bigger Than Myself.” Border Crossings, Dec. 2018,
bordercrossingsmag.com/article/all-sorts-of-things-that-are-bigger-than-myself.
“Five Propositions on Abstract Sculpture” Revolution in the Making: Abstract Sculpture by Women,
1947-2016, by Jenni Sorkin, Skira, 2016, pp. 140-154.
Hall, Gordon. “Object Lessons: Thinking Gender Variance through Minimalist Sculpture.” Over-Beliefs:
Collected Writings, edited by Spencer Byrne- Seres, Portland Institute of Contemporary Art,
2019, pp. 23-25.
Hall, Gordon. “Why I Don’t Talk About ‘The Body’: A Polemic.” Monday Journal, vol. 4, Mar. 2020, pp.
95-107.
Hambleton, Merrell. “Arlene Shechet Creates Beauty Out of Chaos.” The New York Times, The New York
Times, 27 Feb. 2020, www.nytimes.com/2020/02/27/t-magazine/arlene-shechet.html.
Jones, Rachel. “On the Value of Not Knowing: Wonder, Beginning Again, and Letting Be.” On Not
Knowing: How Artists Think, Edited by E Fischer and R Fortnum, Sept. 2013,
www.kettlesyard.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/onn_jones.pdf.
Le Guin, Ursula K. The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Ignota Books, 2020.
Lippard, Lucy R. Get the Message?: a Decade of Art for Social Change. E.P. Dutton, 1984.
Lupo, Nancy. “Artist Q&A > Nancy Lupo.” Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, 18 May 2020,
www.mcasd.org/blog/artist-qa-nancy-lupo.
Martin, Agnes, and Dieter Schwarz. Agnes Martin: Writings = Schriften. Hatje Cantz, 2005.
Meskimmon, Marsha. “Art Matters: Feminist Corporeal-Materialist Aesthetics.” A Companion to
Feminist Art, by Hilary Robinson and Maria Elena Buszek, Wiley Blackwell, 2019, pp. 353-367.
“Nairy Baghramian - Marian Goodman Gallery.” Marian Goodman, 2020,
www.mariangoodman.com/artists/29-nairy-baghramian/.

Nelson, Maggie. The Argonauts. Graywolf Press, 2016.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Duke University Press,
2006.
Sliwinska, Basia. “Cathy Wilkes’ Care-Full Matter-Scapes: Female Affects of Care, Feminist Materiality
and Vibrant Things.” Journal of Visual Art Practice, vol. 18, no. 4, 2019. Pp. 285-304.
Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation and Other Essays. Penguin, 2013.

WORKS CONSULTED
Bachelard, Gaston. Poetics of Space. Beacon Press, 1994.
Hall, Gordon. “Gordon Hall: Artist Talk.” Classroom - Art & Education, 1 Aug. 2019,
www.artandeducation.net/classroom/video/284541/gordon-hall-artist-talk.
Harman, Graham. Object-Oriented Ontology a New Theory of Everything. Pelican, an Imprint of Penguin
Books, 2018.
Krauss, Rosalind E. Passages in Modern Sculpture. MIT Press, 2007.
Meskimmon, Marsha. Contemporary Art and the Cosmopolitan Imagination. Routledge, 2011.
Smith, Zadie. Feel Free: Essays. Penguin Books, 2019.
Solnit, Rebecca. The Mother of All Questions. Haymarket Books, 2019.