Under the Veil of the Queen of Heaven: Color, Symbol, and Reverence in the Practice of Marian Art
Date
2022
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Publisher
University of Oregon
Abstract
This thesis is a documentation of the artistic process and research methods of one young Catholic artist trying to understand the implications of the ritual context of veils and veiling through making veils in the tradition of Catholic veiling. Through this work, she researches art depicting the Blessed Virgin Mary, historical accounts of Mary and the cult of Mary in Christianity, art historical accounts of the veil in specific, Catholic art and art theory, and Catholic post-capitalist political and economic thought. She accounts for the complexity of synthesizing these ideas into a single set of six hand woven chapel veils made based on the Catholic liturgical calendar. Her work with these veils indicates the broader confluence of influences that an artist encounters and synthesizes and seeks to make that complexity more explicit. The artistic process is a process of reasoning that is unpredictable and fluid, even when it is constrained to a prompt or a material. This work shows that process laid bare for one artist as she works through the theoretical and practical aspects of her work.
Description
Keywords
Art, Catholic art, Religious art, Art theory, Weaving