Lesley MFA in Visual Arts

Lesley University | Cambridge, MA | January 2023

Selected works from my 2023 MFA thesis in Visual Arts at Lesley University. My thesis explored psychological and bodily experience through immersive, mixed media installation — often using salvaged domestic materials as a way to confront memory, emotion, and spatial transformation. These installations were part of Lesley’s MFA Graduation Exhibition, a group show that marked the culmination of each artist’s graduate journey. Featured here are two anchor pieces that reflect the core of my exploration: Renovation and Inhibition.

Included is my MFA artist talk, offering further insight into the themes, process, and personal context behind the work. It expands on how material, memory, and emotion shaped the installations featured here.

Renovation

Elizabeth Rennie
Mixed media on wooden door
80’x54′
2022

Renovation was created using a salvaged door from my home during a period of personal transition and physical transformation. As I navigated early independence, pandemic isolation, and the renovation of my living space, I began reestablishing a relationship with both my environment and myself. The door—once a functional threshold—was rendered unusable, layered with fabric, tiles, paint, and plexiglass to reveal both containment and collapse. Its transformation mirrored my own: a reckoning with disconnection and the shifting boundaries of safety in private spaces.

By embracing transformation as an aesthetic principle, I came to understand this piece as a form of portraiture—one that reflects internal states rather than external likeness. The door, like the body, becomes a site of memory, instability, and vulnerability. Transparency, seams, and voids throughout the piece evoke the illusion of protection and the tension between exposure and concealment.

This work also considers how physical spaces influence our psychological experience. Renovating my home forced me to confront not only the placement of objects, but how I inhabited and emotionally responded to those spaces. Renovation marks the beginning of an effort to reclaim and reimagine what safety and selfhood can mean when shaped through both material and memory.

Inhibition

Elizabeth Rennie
Mixed media installation
7’x6’x6′
2022

Inhibition was an immersive installation that explored the tension between control and emotional overflow through the layering of color, light, and material. Built intuitively within the space, the work developed in response to the surrounding architecture and my physical presence within it.

Painted textiles, sculptural components, and colored lighting animated the installation, creating areas that felt both structured and unruly. Some sections were composed and orderly, while others spilled out across the floor and walls—unstable, chaotic, and resistant to containment. Light was used not simply to illuminate but to shift the emotional tone, transforming the perception of color and surface in real time.

This work emphasized the bodily experience of space—how one moves through, reacts to, and attempts to manage physical and psychological environments. Inhibition reflected an internal landscape in flux, where the boundaries between stability and unraveling dissolved into a single, vivid environment.

Artist Talk

MFA Thesis

In my MFA thesis, I explored how mixed media installation can reflect psychological and bodily experiences, particularly in relation to domestic space. Much of the work stemmed from personal encounters with anxiety and panic disorder, and a desire to better understand how physical environments—especially those tied to home—shape emotional perception. By working with salvaged materials, architectural fragments, and familiar objects from my surroundings, I began to treat these elements as extensions of memory and internal state. Through layering, disruption, and spatial tension, I considered how instability and transformation might be made visible, and how the body itself becomes both a subject and a sensor within these shifting environments.