Sienna Evans

BFA ’20 Textile Design

Sienna Evans is an undergraduate student in the School of Art and Design at East Carolina University. She is pursuing a BFA degree in Studio Art with a concentration in Textile Design and a BFA in Art Education with a minor in Art History. Her work deals with her personal struggles with societal beauty standards, spirituality, and carnality. She works primarily with found objects and silk, creating surface design pieces, soft sculpture, and weavings. She believes that her art is a learning process and an opportunity to inspire others.
 

Artist Statement

This body of work reflects spirituality as expressed through carnality in relation to societal ideals of beauty. From the standpoint of humans as both temporal and spiritual beings, the work showcases the beauty of the divine through the grit of the temporal. This body of work aims to represent the intertwining of these two natures, which are expressed with surface design and weaving techniques. Spiritual and physical concepts combine to create form and movement in each piece.

Materials chosen for these works signify the brutality of our carnal existence, such as bones and blood, juxtaposed by silk and other fine materials representing the elegance of the spirit. These pieces suggest elevating the nature of our physical bodies to the splendor that is contained in the soul. This work permits a temporal experience of the divine – the ideals of beauty in our society challenged by the juxtaposition of the gnarly and refined; the corporeal and the transcendent. This aesthetic and conceptual dichotomy refers to the contrasting ideals of beauty that form a chain around the throat of society, which is visually represented in the work through restrictive forms such as a corseted tutu, pointe shoes, and a collar.

These pieces are meant to draw attention to the physical and mystical, which fuse together to create human beauty. Labor intensive textile processes allude to the effort required to build one’s beauty by societal standards, and to express one’s beauty identity as found in tireless work. This limited version of beauty comes at the cost of physical wellbeing and spiritual soundness, as the relentless desire to strive towards a perfect beauty consumes us. This body of work demonstrates that a genuine version of beauty is only experienced when, behind the transparency of our liminal bodies, our metaphysical beauty is revealed.

Carnal Beauty, 2019

Rib bones, silk, acid dyes and printing medium

She is Crowned with Beauty, 2019

Pig guts, beads

Meditation 1, 2020

Tencel, Dynaflo paint, MX dyes

Barely There (Fading Away), 2020

Quilted cotton, MX dyes, sepia pencils, pig guts

Bloodied Beauty, 2019

Digitally-printed silk with bone marrow imagery

Decay of Dreams, 2020

Pig guts, wire, silk, rose petals