A BFA Thesis show by Aubrey Jayne, Sophie Parker, Claire Denton, and Grace Frangente.

In “Exploring Orange,” Aubrey Jayne uses photography to examine how having naturally ginger hair has molded her ideas of femininity and lived experiences with coming of age. Looking at the intersection of red hair and girlhood, she touches on common stereotypes, hyper fetishization, and lack of community. Creating images with other women that look like her, she forms a community within this series, finding herself within the experiences of others that share those same identities. She looks at her subjects with a calm and graceful gaze, asking the viewer to reckon with their preconceptions and demystifying the material hair itself.

Claire Denton examines the relationship between pattern and play through the sensory experiences of touch, listening, and viewing, inviting the audience to engage physically with the work. She uses bright colors and squiggle shapes alongside harsh lines, creating a sense of depth and layering that evokes childlike and psychedelic experiences of discovery. She is inspired by technology and nonsensical language, drawing on past investigations of pattern recognition in language.

Grace Frangente plays the tension between control and disruption through a series of geometric paintings built from hand-painted stripes in alternating directions. Hundreds of wobbly brushstrokes of color, cartoonishly separated by thin black outlines, are contained within hard-edged geometric structures. Beginning with rigid grid systems, the paintings gradually fracture into clusters, gaps, and shifting arrangements that interrupt visual continuity. Drawing from repetition, accumulation, and the physical residue of process, the work considers how order and disorder, structure and chance, can exist simultaneously.

Sophie Parker’s thesis centers on a series of three hosted dinners with distinct communities that shape her life, including her work environment, family, and friendships. For each gathering, she has designed and fabricated a custom set of ceramic tableware informed by her perception of each group’s identity, translating their dynamics, values, and relational energy into material form.

The dinners function as both lived experiences and performative acts of care, while the tableware and documentation serve as lasting artifacts. Drawing from functional ceramics, social practice, and feminist histories of domestic labor, the project positions hosting as both a conceptual and material strategy. This work investigates how intentional making and communal rituals can resist isolation and capitalist value systems that privilege productivity over connection. Ultimately, the work explores how objects can embody collective identity and how craft can hold emotional, relational, and experiential meaning.