Journal of Student Research 2018

The Tips of Fingers, the Falling of Things The Tips of Fingers, the Falling of Things

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Bennett Pearson Senior, BFA in Studio Art: Concentration in Contemporary Sculpture Practices There are certain moments that take precedence in life and for me it is art’s role to pay homage to these moments and memories. As I analyze moments, memories, and phenomena around me, I envision what their barest and more sincere elements are to me. This analysis will often take hold too early, without leaving room for the work to breathe. My work is often object-oriented, remnants of words and/or pun, or my own attempts to merge thought and physicality. This work presents itself as a conversational, stream of-consciousness prose that later, upon reflection, becomes something new. It starts as research, becomes abstracted through working and reworking, and becomes research again when it is complete, finding visual connections to the other writings that surround it. In this way, it doesn’t differ from other arts that are visual, or more actually tangible. The work presented in The Tips of Fingers, the Falling of Things is a retelling of selected stories from Pu Songling’s Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio , done in a way that, by it being retold in the present, finds itself contemporary. By processing multiple translations of the same piece side-by-side, I was able to make sense of the words, but not always the content. This dissonance forces me to re-envision the context of the work, placing it where I stand today. The addition of /fingers slipping away from/ acts as a way to create a visual hierarchy in the prose, and, additionally, acts as a material, giving reference to its creator and maintaining cohesiveness to all pieces. Content immediately following these markers becomes more noticeable, allowing the reader to find importance where I see it, where I’ve marked it, and where it is.