Graduation Year

2013

Document Type

Open Access Senior Thesis

Degree Name

Bachelor of Arts

Department

Art

Reader 1

Susan Rankaitis

Reader 2

Elana Mann

Terms of Use & License Information

Terms of Use for work posted in Scholarship@Claremont.

Rights Information

© 2012 Adele Ball

Abstract

Auras is a series of illustrations of Carlos Fuentes’s novella, Aura, a horror love story about memory, obsession, desire, corporeality and immortality. Defying narrative conventions, the story is told through second person. You are the protagonist, Felipe Montero, and are employed by a 109-year old widow to edit her husband's memoirs. Inside the pitchblack house, you fall in love with her beautiful and bizarre green-eyed niece, Aura. The gradual discovery of the true relationship between the young woman and her aunt propel the story to its extraordinary conclusion.

The story seems to take place within the confines of the widow’s mind. The plot mimics the obsessive, hypnotic quality of nostalgia and memory. Much of my illustrative content and artistic process reflects a personal obsessive nostalgia I have for my grandmother and her life. It is her image, young and old, coupled with the complex and repetitive processes of printmaking, both traditional and current, that inform my illustration and personal interpretation of Aura. My thesis research conculs a series of artistic processes and theories behind image-making that relish the synthesis of new and old. I look at early horror illustration by Harry Clarke and Francesco Goya, and analyze images and practices in early digital graphic design and April Greiman, reappropriated inkjet and woodblock prints (Anselm Kiefer), and my own lasercut woodblock prints.

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