Due to limited studio space, not every Union University art student can display his or her work in a senior show.
However, each senior art major must enroll in ART 499 (Seminar III: Portfolio and Graduating Exhibit), working an entire semester to create a collection of art that displays what they have learned and centered around a unifying theme.
Hilary Borden, Kathryn Buncik and Lindsey Howerton, senior art majors enrolled in ART 499, each bring a sense of hope and renewal to their unique projects.
Hilary Borden said she plans to create a wordless children’s book.
“I want to use all my illustrations to make up the book so it flows visually,” Borden said.
Her still-untitled book tells the story of a little boy who looks up at the sky to find there are no stars, Borden said.
He begins “crawling through space” and finding the stars again to follow them back to his bedroom.
“It’s a journey through space, but it’s whimsical,” Borden said. “It has to do with stars and finding your way back home.”
She plans to do the illustrations in pencil, pen and ink and watercolor.
Borden, who wants to be a professional illustrator of children’s books, said she hopes to publish the work after its completion.
“My work isn’t really intended for a gallery space,” she said. “I hope that [people] look at it and it makes them feel nostalgic, and it makes the adults feel like kids again, and I hope it’s something that kids will enjoy reading as well.”
After graduation, Borden hopes to move to Nashville and begin work as a freelance illustrator or possibly sign on with a publishing company.
Borden added she thinks children and adults can enjoy picture books.
“I think you can pack a lot into a picture book. It doesn’t have to be light and whimsical and that’s it,” she said. “It can have more.”
Her classmate Kathryn Buncik also is developing illustrative work: a collection of multimedia collage pieces, centered around the theme of “Hide and Seek.”
“As far as how I make things, [collage is] very intuitive, so I don’t usually know what I’m going to make until I sit down,” Buncik said, although these pieces will likely include pictures of children in the acts of hiding, seeking or both.
She visits thrift stores, antique stores and garage sales searching for paper materials to layer: old books, postcards or pictures.
“Anything over 30 years old is prime material,” she added.
The finished show will likely include nine to 12 pieces, and will be displayed in July at the Atlas gallery in Greeley, Colo., where Buncik interned two summers ago. Her contacts at the gallery gave Buncik the theme.
“The work that I already make fits really well within that theme,” she said. “I like to focus on curiosity and wonder … I want [people] to look at [the art] and maybe think, ‘What’s going on here?’ but in a pleasant way.”
Buncik said she hopes to further develop her individual, recognizable style, but also to leave viewers of her art with “pleasant curiosity.”
“As we get older we’re encouraged to wonder about things less and less and everyone wants us to just know,” she said. “They’re afraid of not knowing things. I like to embrace not knowing things.”
After graduation, Buncik plans to move to Denver, Colo., and start out in freelance design and artwork. She said she would love to design album art or magazine and journal illustrations.
Another senior, Lindsey Howerton, drew on literary and Scriptural inspiration for her project, titled “Through the Deep Dark Valley.”
Howerton described a passage in John Bunyan’s allegory “Pilgrim’s Progress,” in which the protagonist Christian passes through Valley of Shadow of Death, finding comfort despite the darkness in hearing a voice recite Psalm 23.
“It’s not even necessarily exactly what [the voice] says that matters, it’s the fact that somebody says something, that there’s somebody living through this,” she said.
This idea, in combination with the story of Nehemiah 3, in which the Israelites build a wall of remembrance, inspired Howerton’s project.
“I’m asking people to photograph something that reminds them of a time of despair in their own lives, then projecting that image onto them and taking a portrait of them with that image,” she said.
Howerton also has photographed several self-portraits representative of times of darkness in her own life.
She hopes to gather 100 portraits and line the wall of her gallery space with them, then cover half of that wall with Plexiglas on which visitors can write their own stories and messages.
“It’s laying down stones of remembrance and saying, ‘Here is my altar to the Lord, here is what he’s done before’ … When we’re in despair, we have a hard time remembering that,” Howerton said. “So when other people around us are in despair, what they need is for us to remember the things the Lord has done for us.”
She said she hopes to eventually compile the portraits into a book and publish them, along with people’s stories of redemption.
After graduation, Howerton plans on “staying as close to Jackson as possible and loving my church well,” she said.
She hopes to get a photography position for a year while taking the GRE and applying to graduate schools for art therapy, her ultimate career goal.
A panel of Union art faculty will interview each senior art major and determine which receives the limited display space. Senior art shows will be on display beginning in late April.
