an epistemology of beauty

Master of architecture, thesis

university of Washington | fall 2019

Situating the Affect of embodied knowledge through the discourse of contact improvisation:

This thesis explores new ways of representing and engaging with beauty as a critical driver of how we produce space, as a constant contact improvisation amongst materials, creatures and ideas. Through the deconstruction of the traditional tripartite, subject-object-knowledge relationship, which places representation as the linchpin holding knower and knowledge together; I have developed a methodology combining the modern dance discourse of contact improvisation with the drawing practice of collage to re-imagine how we describe beauty. In the process of performing this methodology, I have begun to uncover how myself and my way of moving through the world has emerged alongside my understanding of what beauty is and how it happens.

Independent Master’s Thesis

Thesis Advisors: Vikram Prakash & Nicole Huber

Diagraming Diffraction
| Acrylic, Digital Collage
*Diffraction as the production of change following a moment of contact between dancers, each embodying a lifetime of knowledge.*

“Diffraction, understood using quantum physics, is not just a matter of interference, but of entanglement, an ethico-onto-epistemological matter...”

- Karen Barad, (interview) “Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers”

A Rolling Mist of Production
| Hand drawing, watercolor, collage, digital collage

“Sometimes it seems cruel and harsh to recall those first interactions with anemones.
There is shame.

Watching the boys poke curiously, I wanted to feel fearless in my exploration too.
But the way the anemone curled up in retraction from my touch, the edge of my fingernail like a blade to that soft blossom of color.

Looking back on it now, it seems I was careless, not considering the anemone’s typical partner to be the edgeless rolling sea. But I’ve gotten to know the anemone better, my fingers have learned the soft, sand-paper wrapped jelly’s caress.

My fingers have learned another balance. “

Learning What to See : A Section
| Hand drawing, Watercolor, Collage, Digital Collage
*A mapping of how images, memories and ideas have moved together in the emergence of a moment I saw as beautiful.*

I see these memories in many moments of beauty, feel the cool salt breeze from the top of cascade head as the rolling hills of wildflowers reveal themselves with open arms, those worm holes into the cool bright world of the northern pacific.

But they don’t exist in isolation, they are no longer just romantic images of the sublime.

These spaces, the memories tethered to them and all of the minuscule thoughts, motions and actors in-between are part of the construction of the landscape through which my knowledge of beauty and self have emerged.