Graduate Students Awarded Willson Center Research Grants

The Lamar Dodd School of Art is pleased to share that three graduate students have been awarded funding from the Willson Center. Rachel Seburn, Shaunia Lynn Grant, and Ciel Rodriguez are recent recipients of Willson Center for Humanities & Arts grants for travel and research. The Willson Center Graduate Research Awards are merit-based grants given to University of Georgia graduate students to support expenses for arts and humanities research projects. Students submit applications to fund their continued research on a range of projects, and the Dodd is excited to highlight the well-deserved awards to three of its students.  

Rachel Seburn

Rachel Seburn is a first-year international graduate student studying studio art and a graduate research assistant for Ideas and Creative Exploration. She focuses on curatorial and international artistic exchange; with a continued focus on facilitating proper representation of marginalized and underrepresented artists. Her grant will allow her to further explore her thesis with a focus on how spatially and socially engaged sound performance can happen virtually and give a similar visceral experience to the live performance model.

Canadian artists Sarah Seburn ( sound composer, sculptor, performance and installation artist) and Charlton Diaz (D.J, designer, dancer, choreographer and installation artist) will virtually perform from their home solarium in Edmonton, Alberta. 

Shaunia Lynn Grant

Shaunia Lynn Grant is a first year MFA candidate. Her award supported the purchase of new equipment for her practice. She is an object maker, born and raised in the border town of Las Cruces, New Mexico. Her identity as a queer woman of color informs her perspective as a maker. In her undergraduate BFA research at New Mexico State University, she expressed her own struggles with body image and chronic illness through jewelry and installation. 

Ciel Rodriguez

Ciel Rodriguez was also awarded for her proposal. As a third-year graduate student in the MFA Studio Art program, Rodriguez is now actively working on her thesis work to be shown in March 2021. As she finalizes her research plans for the school year, she proposed building a 22×30 inch deckle-box for papermaking – a standard paper size. Rodriguez’ research incorporates papermaking in many facets, creating works that hang on the wall and handmade books that viewers can hold and interact with. Rebelling against quick digital output, Rodriguez practices the art of slowing down, melding modern and antiquated methods of making by combining alternative photography, writing & poetry, papermaking processes, and bookbinding. Her practice encourages interdisciplinary research by engaging with multiple mediums and exploring ideas from the fields of scientific memory research. Her work focuses on enveloping viewers in quiet expanses, evoking states of mind or states of remembrance. Rodriguez’ art practice bloomed out of a need to document and process her experience with grief and death and, in turn, create space for others to connect with their own feelings of loss, and find a glimmer of hope, happiness or joy once again. She also explores how different fibers like abaca and cotton pulp respond to embedded plant materials in her artistic research. As there is no deckle-box equipment provided in the UGA papermaking studio, this proposal would offer a valuable tool for making larger format handmade paper. The UGA studio is currently only outfitted for smaller sizes. With the assistance of the Wilson Center, the acquisition of the requested supplies would create new opportunities for her artistic research in making paper by hand.