The most significant part of my experience at Olin has been the people I have met and the friendships I have made. I wanted to do an AHS Capstone project that really represented the importance that these people have had in the past four years of my life. Doing this project with embroidery offers a unique way to accomplish this. The process of creating each portrait gave me time to focus on each subject; while creating the portraits, I can think about each subject as a person and about my relationship to each of them. I created a series of 10 embroidered portraits and an artist’s statement about the project. At the end of the semester, all of the portraits were displayed together in Milas Hall and at Expo before being sent off to each subject.

I chose to create portraits as my AHS capstone because I find drawing humans extremely interesting; not only are bodies fascinating and incredible machines, humans also have very distinct personalities. I wanted to explore drawing people that I see every day and using my art as a way to portray some aspect of their personality. I was interested in trying to depict personality because it is something that I see every day, but that the average viewer of a portrait might not necessarily see. I explored multiple ways of doing this and eventually decided on using both composition and medium/approach to show personality.