A view of my thesis exhibition, “Out of the Dark/Into the Water.”

Well, it’s finally happening: my three-year stint at Columbia is finally coming to an end! On Friday, the InterArts thesis show had its official opening, and all of my friends and family came out to support this very exhausted, but content, artist.

It’s been a wild three years. There is always debate about whether graduate programs (and this one in particular) should be two or three years long, but I think I needed that “extra” first year to really get my bearings, adjust to graduate life, and start to understand the type of work I wanted to make and how I wanted to make it.

The first year is about experimentation, play, and taking risks, and although it can be hard to do those things when you’re struggling to settle into a new life in a new place, Columbia provided me with an absolute playground of studio facilities and equipment to get the gears turning. I still remember my first graduate critique, in which I was interrogated about why I had made the object I brought in to show. And the answer was: I didn’t know. I came to grad school because I felt my work lacked a conceptual basis, and at the time, I really was just making things because I thought they were cool. There’s nothing wrong with that, but telling a story or building a world was most important to me, and I wanted to know how.

My exhibition space, all set up for my lecture about the project.

The second year is about refining and narrowing down a line of inquiry. Whereas my first-year work was all over the place in terms of both form and content, by my second year I knew that I wanted to explore themes from a certain time period, bookbinding structures that related to the content they held, and family histories or legacies. I combined these things into an edition of artist books called Maneater, which was my first attempt at a major publication project. It whet my whistle for thesis and taught me a lot about project management. Thank goodness it did, because it took me about a year and a half to make, while my thesis book and project had to be completed in under a year…

And while this year has been stressful, it feels like I’m streamlining the process of creating the things I love—artist books and art objects of all sorts—more and more. I feel ready to begin my post-graduate life, propelled by everything I’ve learned and done here (well… after a week or two of solid sleeping.) It’s been wonderful, Columbia.

The inside spread illustration of the artist book that goes along with my exhibition.