The first exhibit-- Weaving Ways of Knowing Mary is an exhibition of woven works derived from a collaborative summer research experience, funded through the CAS Dean's Summer Fellowship and the International Marian Research Institute. Over the course of three months, faculty member Darden Bradshaw, undergraduate students Casey Harner and Whitney Johnston, and graduate student Elise Abshire engaged in collective arts-based research around the question "how might we come to know Mary through the embodied practice of weaving?" Like weaving itself, our work was iterative, personal, meditative, and communal. Each week we would read and respond individually to different academic readings on Mary. Then, coming together we would discuss the readings and our responses while weaving. We listened to each other, shared our understandings and confronted the tensions, threads of connection, and interlacements of hope stemming from ideas and ideals of Mary. The resulting artworks, juxtaposed with artworks from the Marian Library collection, reflect our various faith traditions, life experiences and artistic practices -- the warp onto which we wove new webs of understanding Mary, each other, and ourselves.
The other exhibition, held simultaneously is titled: Weaving Ways of Knowing Grief. The work in this exhibition was created by R. Darden Bradshaw in the aftermath of losing both her parents within a four-month period of time. For Bradshaw, the impact of these losses was reminiscent of when, in her youth in the 1970's each evening at 11pm the television station would go off-air. All the color, noise, and light suspended; all that was left behind was the sound of static and the continuous rolling of lines through the television set, as images and scenes reverberated silently in memory. Using the slow, history-laden, methodical, and meditative practices of weaving, beading, stitching, and embroidery, Bradshaw's work invites the viewer to explore the human experience of loss. It is in such liminal spaces where the sorting of objects and memories, familial relationships, incoherent narratives, and deeply fixed legacies become projected, displayed, performed, and potentially, unpacked.
The other exhibition, held simultaneously is titled: Weaving Ways of Knowing Grief. The work in this exhibition was created by R. Darden Bradshaw in the aftermath of losing both her parents within a four-month period of time. For Bradshaw, the impact of these losses was reminiscent of when, in her youth in the 1970's each evening at 11pm the television station would go off-air. All the color, noise, and light suspended; all that was left behind was the sound of static and the continuous rolling of lines through the television set, as images and scenes reverberated silently in memory. Using the slow, history-laden, methodical, and meditative practices of weaving, beading, stitching, and embroidery, Bradshaw's work invites the viewer to explore the human experience of loss. It is in such liminal spaces where the sorting of objects and memories, familial relationships, incoherent narratives, and deeply fixed legacies become projected, displayed, performed, and potentially, unpacked.