Semester of Graduation

Summer 2026

Degree

Master of Fine Arts (MFA)

Department

Printmaking

Document Type

Thesis

Abstract

I was raised to understand home through labor. In the working-class household I grew up in, in rural Southeastern Pennsylvania, value was earned through work, identity took shape through trade, and rest was often an afterthought. That framework was not chosen. It was inherited. And it has not been easy to see it clearly from the inside.

The Exhibition, Within These Walls, examines that inheritance through printmaking and sculpture, using the material and spatial language of domestic construction as both subject and method. Through fragile paper structures that resemble wood but cannot hold weight, a staircase that cannot be climbed, and images found within darkness rather than placed against it, the work asks what inherited values make possible and what they make difficult.

What emerges is not a definition. It is a practice. Home is shaped by the values we inherit and reshaped by the lives we actually live, built through labor, sustained through care, and made meaningful through the willingness to rest inside what we have made and recognize it, imperfect as it may be, as enough.

Date

5-15-2026

Committee Chair

Leslie Koptcho

LSU Acknowledgement

1

LSU Accessibility Acknowledgment

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