During a Q&A at the Mount David Summit, Bates’ annual celebration of student achievement, someone asked how the seven studio art majors were feeling as they moved the fruits of their year-long projects from the relative privacy of their Olin Arts Center studios to the public space of the Museum of Art.
Every year, works by seniors are featured in the Senior Thesis Exhibition at the museum, mounted professionally and ready for viewing until Commencement.
If they were nervous, the seniors didn’t show it. Miryam Keller ’25 of Cape Elizabeth, Maine, was ready for the necessary culmination of all that alone time in the studio over the course of her senior year.
“I feel like my works will now have their own relationship with other people,” Keller said. Her mixed-media work features materials collected from her beloved Maine coast. “To me, a piece feels successful if somebody is able to emotionally connect with it. I guess it speaks to empathy.”
Avery Lehman ’25 of Portsmouth, N.H., spoke of the possibility of visitors finding common ground in her mixed-media thesis project, a set of cotton quilts that incorporate photographic images, fleeting and intimate, during her final year at Bates.
Her hope? That viewers “find footing for their own memories in these pieces,” she said, an invitation, via highly personal artwork, for individual interpretation.
“Ultimately, they’re going to look at it and they may feel something entirely different than what I intended — but that’s kind of the beautiful part of it.”
Each year, two Bates faculty members advise the seniors as they develop a cohesive body of artistic work. This year’s advisers were Carolina González Valencia, associate professor of art and visual culture, and Susan A. Dewsnap, lecturer in art and visual culture. Michel Droge, a visiting lecturer in art and visual culture, works with the seniors as the exhibition’s lead preparator.
Titled Under the Parachute, this year’s exhibition is open through May 24. While the work is the thesis, every senior also has to write an artist statement. These are excerpted below, illustrated with another annual Bates tradition, portraits of the artists in their Olin Arts Center studios created by Phyllis Graber Jensen.
Lizi Barrow — A Momentary Reprise
For Lizi Barrow of Winchester, Mass., who is also a major in environmental studies, the act of painting is an act of inheritance.
Her work presents a lineage of women — her grandmother, her mother, and herself — linked by love, memory, and the quiet intimacy of ordinary moments. Her work reimagines family photographs taken by her grandmother, Nina Ravenscroft Norton Smith, of Barrow’s mother during her lifetime.
“I engage with my grandmother’s photographic representations of moments in time, my mother’s retelling of these moments, and my own childhood memories to visually combine the memories and lived experiences of three different generations of women.
“My paintings depict ordinary moments of stillness, where the safety and comfort of Home lulls the subjects to sleep. I invite my viewer to take part in these peaceful moments, offering a momentary reprise from the chaotic world outside of the frame.”
Miryam Keller — Cycles of Salt and Memory
In her mixed-media compositions, Miryam Keller of Cape Elizabeth, Maine, who is also an earth and climate sciences major, starts with ocean water collected from places along her beloved Maine coast — such as Higgins Beach, Pemaquid Point, and East End Beach — to capture rhythms of nature and memory.
Each piece begins as a circle of ocean water on mat board, into which she introduces ink and crushed minerals. As the salt water evaporates, pigments settle, salt crystals bloom, and the paper distorts.
“Using water, my work bridges our emotional and physical experiences in the landscape. I aim to create an environment of unstructured observation and stillness that invites presence and reflection. Through each individual atmosphere, I hope to draw attention to our relationship with bodies of water as a point of connection and communication.
“I am endlessly mesmerized by the depths of the underwater world, and as I go deeper into its mystery I find my internal world mirrored back.”
Avery Lehman — Memory, Patched and Pieced
For Avery Lehman of Portsmouth, N.H., memory lives in fabric and photography.
From photographs taken with from black-and-white film, Lehman printed cyanotypes — blue-toned prints often used in artwork — onto pieces of cotton canvas, from which she created quilts. The quilts depict fleeting intimacies from her final year at Bates — friends holding hands at the beach — while challenging the expectation of perfection in feminist craft traditions.
“Using these methods, I construct or mend textiles to protect the love and care that the images hold. The gestural aspects of the pieces may allow viewers’ own memories to find footing somewhere in the work. The unfinished details of this work imply a continuation past the exhibition date as I acknowledge that this effort will persist throughout the course of my life — and that the longing to freeze a moment will never cease.”
Erin McCarthy — A Vessel Transformed
Erin McCarthy of Bangor, Maine, creates ceramic forms that begin as vessels — but they rarely stay that way, hence the name she gave her works, “Metamorphose series.” “My journey with clay has always been driven by a desire to blur the lines between functional forms and sculptural abstraction.”
“These pieces represent a pivotal moment in my artistic growth, where my personal vision reshapes the traditional techniques I’ve learned. I chose the traditional coil-building technique, constructing vessels that organically transitioned into abstract shapes [and] allowed the clay to guide the process.
“Beginning as traditional vessels, the pieces gradually evolve into abstract sculptures, mirroring my own artistic transformation. I also aimed to challenge the viewer’s perspective, highlighting the transformative power of a shift in viewpoint.”
Alex Provasnik — Stitched Disruption
Alex Provasnik of Arlington, Va., who is also a chemistry major, is well-known at Bates for her functional ceramics.
But for her senior thesis, she unraveled those expectations. She drilled and perforated her ceramics, then entwined the holes with embroidery thread or yarn, turning traditional pots into hand-stitched landscapes.
“Threads and fibers engulf some holes while others remain unthreaded, providing glimpses of the inside and a reminder of the labor in creating and stitching each one. This work not only steps away from these practices’ utilitarian roots but uses the fibers to interrupt the functionality of what otherwise would be a usable pot.
“The grid provides structure and an environment for geometric patterns to emerge and evolve. The process of creating these works is very rigorous and time-consuming yet also rhythmic and meditative.”
Lila Schaefer — Where the Body Meets the Room
Lila Schaefer of Northampton, Mass., creates sculptures and watercolors that combine hard-edged geometry with soft, anthropomorphic forms, evoking the interaction between the internal self and the physical world of things we expect to see everyday, like a lamp.
The works — layered with aluminum wire, polyfill, fabric, and wood — form an abstracted domestic space: a surreal living room where emotion permeates design.
“These sculptures challenge the pursuit of efficiency and control in our built environments, advocating instead for a more open, unpredictable approach to human experience. The ‘skin’ acts as a crucial boundary, symbolizing the interface between the internal self and the outside world.
“The materials I use reflect my interest in merging soft, handmade elements with more functional aspects of design [and] the organic, playful qualities of these pieces resist the idealized perfection of contemporary design.”
Danny Zuniga Zarat — A Divine Kind of Ache
Danny Zuniga Zarat of Houston, who is also a major in Latin American and Latinx studies, works in charcoal, performance, and video, creating alternative spiritual spaces where migration, memory, and transformation are explored through deeply personal ritual. In each medium, he emphasizes his own body as a tool of agency and power.
“This solace in my body allows me to see it as a site of agency and power. These different mediums allow me to depict and transform the suffering and the pain into works of a divine quality, always moving and charged with energy.
“I push myself to a space of explosive vulnerability, a place where I can dream outside of myself and create semi-deities that function as archetypes to personal and shared feelings. Whether strong or wounded, the figures in my work stand tall, fully enveloped in either suffering, anger, or bliss, and the viewers act as witnesses to the breathing scene.”
