Dawn Hunter's South Carolina Sunshine
FOUNDATIONS: ARTS 103
Significant Content: Shrine Inventory and Final Project
by Dawn Hunter, Project Author
and ARTS 103 Course Director. Based on Shannon Lindsey’s Content and Metaphor Project and Jim Sajovic’s Foundations Shrine Project
“Art enables us to find ourselves and lose ourselves at the same time.”
—Thomas Merton, No Man Is an Island
Deconstruction, Reconstruction, and Independent Meaning: The Shrine Inventory and Final Project brings together the formal, perceptual, and conceptual strategies developed throughout ARTS 103. Students begin by constructing a personal assemblage—a “shrine”—from objects, images, clothing, papers, and other materials connected to their lives and experiences. Rather than beginning with a predetermined image for the final composition, students first create an environment rich with personal associations and visual information.
Olivia Askins | Shrine Final Project Mixed media
In her final composition, Olivia Askins transforms materials and imagery explored through her shrine and preliminary studies into a layered mixed-media work. The flowers symbolize childhood, growth, and her discovery that art can extend beyond drawing through experimentation with materials, layering, and reinterpretation. Crocheted borders, fiber flowers and stems, celestial imagery, and metallic spirals bring drawing, collage, pattern, and physical texture together within the composition.
Continued, Significant Content
The shrine then becomes the subject of sustained observation, interpretation, and transformation. Students examine the assemblage from multiple viewpoints, isolate portions of it, investigate positive and negative space, and develop a series of thumbnails that translate the three-dimensional arrangement into possible two-dimensional compositions.
The final work may be abstract or representational, but it must communicate a concept. At this stage of the course, the elements and principles of design are no longer the subject of the assignment. They have become tools students use to communicate something else.
Shrine Inventory and Preliminary Studies | Olivia Askins
Olivia Askins’s shrine, left, establishes an inventory of personal materials, textures, imagery, and symbols that become the starting point for her final project. In her preliminary studies, right, she selects and transforms elements from the assemblage through collage, crochet, drawing, pattern, and abstraction. Flowers, curving stems, celestial imagery, and spiral forms emerge as recurring motifs as Askins moves from intuitive assemblage toward a more intentional exploration of childhood, growth, and creative discovery.
Building the Shrine: Personal Experience as Visual Material
Students begin by creating an assemblage that reflects something about themselves or their life experiences. The shrine is intentionally open-ended. Objects may carry personal histories, cultural associations, memories, or symbolic meanings, while other selections may initially be made intuitively.
This process builds upon the intuitive approach introduced in Slashing Symbols. Students do not need to know exactly what every object will mean before they begin. Instead, making and arranging become forms of discovery. Relationships emerge through juxtaposition, repetition, scale, placement, material, and association.
The resulting shrine is not the final artwork. It is an inventory of visual and conceptual possibilities from which the student will work.
Shrine Inventory and Preliminary Studies | Alondra Olvera
Olvera’s shrine, left, establishes a visual and symbolic vocabulary through contrasting black and white, corn fiber, and repeated triangular forms. Her preliminary studies, right, deconstruct and reorganize that vocabulary through experiments with pattern, movement, positive and negative space, and the emerging image of a snake. These investigations provide the bridge between the intuitive assemblage and the more resolved symbolism of the final composition.
From Three Dimensions to Two
Once the shrine has been constructed, students shift from intuitive assemblage to careful observation.
They examine the setup from different positions and distances, looking for both its essence and its totality. What distinguishes this particular arrangement? Where do positive and negative spaces occur? Are there dominant diagonals, repeated shapes, patterns, or unexpected relationships? What happens when a small section is isolated from the whole?
Students record these observations through a series of thumbnails. As in the earlier Planar Form projects, the thumbnail is not simply a miniature version of a predetermined final composition. It is a space for testing possibilities.
Students may crop, enlarge, simplify, layer, abstract, or combine different portions of the shrine. Through this process, observation begins to move toward interpretation.
Shrine Inventory, Preliminary Studies, and Final Project | Ella Hasek
Ella Hasek’s project documents the transformation of a densely layered personal shrine into an increasingly focused visual vocabulary. Through her preliminary studies, Hasek selects and reinterprets recurring imagery—including butterflies, an eye, flowers, mushrooms, a figure, and celestial references—while experimenting with scale, color, positive and negative space, text, and juxtaposition. In the final composition, these previously separate elements are reconstructed into a unified moon-like environment organized around the question, “How far is the moon?” The sequence demonstrates how observation, selection, deconstruction, and experimentation can transform personal source material into an independent visual composition.
Deconstruction and Reconstruction
The Shrine project returns to a process students have encountered throughout the semester: taking visual information apart in order to understand what else it can become.
In earlier projects, students extracted shapes from negative space, transformed observed information into planar forms, or physically fragmented previous paintings in Quilting Bee. Here, the process becomes more independent. Students determine what should be retained, eliminated, emphasized, altered, or combined.
An object does not have to remain an object. Its contour might become a shape. A gap between objects might become a dominant negative space. A fragment of clothing might contribute texture or pattern. A personally meaningful object might be transformed into a metaphor rather than represented literally.
The movement can be understood as:
PERSONAL EXPERIENCE → ASSEMBLAGE → OBSERVATION → DECONSTRUCTION → INTERPRETATION → RECONSTRUCTION → MEANING
Shrine Inventory, Preliminary Studies, and Final Project | Student Artwork
This sequence documents the progression from personal assemblage to preliminary exploration and final composition. The student selects recurring imagery from the shrine—including polyhedral dice, fishhooks, circular forms, and reflective surfaces—and tests new arrangements through a series of thumbnails. In the final project, these elements are enlarged, abstracted, and reconstructed through color, texture, repetition, and changes in scale, demonstrating how visual information gathered in the shrine can be transformed into an independent composition.
Symbol, Metaphor, and Significant Content
The Shrine project also extends the investigation of symbolism begun in Slashing Symbols. Students work with imagery and objects that originate in their own experiences and decide how those materials can contribute to a larger idea.
They may select a single symbol or metaphor from the shrine, combine several associations, or allow the overall character of the assemblage to become the conceptual basis of the final work. Meaning can emerge through representation, abstraction, material, texture, juxtaposition, or the relationships among forms.
The goal is not to illustrate a personal story literally. Instead, students consider how visual decisions can carry meaning.
This distinction is central to Significant Content: students move from learning how visual language operates to deciding what they want that language to communicate.
Shrine Inventory, Preliminary Studies, and Final Project | Lily Pruitt
This sequence traces Lily Pruitt’s development from a densely layered personal shrine through preliminary experimentation to a resolved final composition. Pruitt selects recurring colors, flowers, patterns, geometric forms, and linear motifs from the shrine and tests new combinations through her thumbnails. In the final work, these elements are deconstructed, abstracted, and reconstructed around a new central image, demonstrating how personal source material can be transformed rather than simply carried forward from one stage of the project to the next.
Retrieving the Foundations Vocabulary
Although this is the final project, students are not being asked to abandon the formal knowledge developed earlier in the semester. They are expected to retrieve it.
Positive and negative space, line, shape, value, texture, repetition, movement, balance, scale, emphasis, and other principles remain available to them. Students intentionally incorporate emphasis and additional elements and principles of design, but they determine how those choices support the concept rather than treating them as isolated requirements.
The mixed-media format expands those possibilities. Drawing media, India ink, paint, collage, gel medium, physical texture, and found material may be layered and overlapped within the final 18 × 24-inch composition.
The complexity of the materials therefore parallels the increasing complexity of the thinking.
Shrine Inventory, Preliminary Studies, and Final Project | Renee Carroll
This sequence traces Renee Carroll’s development from a densely layered shrine through preliminary studies to a more abstract final composition. Carroll investigates contrasts already present in the shrine—dark and light, rough and smooth, muted and saturated, fragmented and whole—while repeatedly returning to torn book pages as both image and material. Through the studies, she tests different ways of reorganizing these elements before arriving at a final work that transforms the shrine’s physical textures and visual contrasts into a new composition.
From Directed Application to Independent Retrieval
Throughout ARTS 103, students encounter visual strategies in increasingly different contexts. Early assignments provide relatively explicit problems and constraints. Later projects ask students to retrieve those strategies without being told exactly how each one should be used.
The Shrine Final represents an important point in that progression. Students have accumulated a vocabulary through drawing, collage, observation, abstraction, composition, and previous Significant Content projects. They now decide which parts of that vocabulary are useful to the problem they have created for themselves.
The educational movement is therefore not simply from beginning skills to more advanced skills. It is a movement from directed application toward independent retrieval and adaptation.
Students demonstrate transfer when they recognize that something learned in an earlier context can help them solve a problem that looks very different from the one in which that knowledge was first acquired.
Shrine Inventory and Final Project | Khalon (Robert) Thompson
This pairing shows Khalon Thompson’s progression from the collection and organization of personal visual material in the Shrine Inventory to the deliberate construction of metaphor and symbolism in the Final Project. In the final work, Thompson uses the mask, fragmented imagery, color, balance, and the figure to address presentation, disconnection, perfection, internal pressure, and opposing states. His reflection also points back to an earlier stage of the course: Thompson identifies the Planar Art Form project as the project from which he learned the most, noting that he now uses those concepts in his abstract sketches and finds them useful for understanding “abstraction, design, metaphor and symbolism.”
Seeing, Thinking, Making, and Problem-Solving
The Shrine project brings the recursive structure of the course together.
Students discover possibilities through intuitive assemblage. They perceive relationships through observation. They interpret personal objects and visual associations. They construct the shrine and preliminary compositions. They deconstruct those arrangements through cropping, abstraction, selection, and experimentation. Finally, they reconstruct that information as an independent work communicating significant content.
In that sense, the final project does not mark the end of a linear sequence. It demonstrates how the processes practiced throughout the semester can operate together:
DISCOVERY → PERCEPTION → INTERPRETATION → CONSTRUCTION → DECONSTRUCTION → RECONSTRUCTION ↺
Seeing, thinking, making, problem-solving, and communicating are no longer separated into individual exercises. They operate simultaneously as part of the student's creative process.
Student Artwork | Artist Study to Quilting Bee
The original artist-study painting, left, becomes the source material for the Quilting Bee composition, right. After making high-quality copies of the painting, the student cut the reproductions into one-inch squares and reorganized the fragments into a repeat pattern with anomalies. Shapes, lines, values, and painted marks that originally described objects in the still life are removed from their first context and transformed into a new geometric visual system. The pairing demonstrates how students deconstruct, re-contextualize, and reconstruct their previous work to create new visual meaning.
The Final Composition
The final 18 × 24-inch mixed-media composition may be representational or abstract. Students layer drawing, ink, paint, collage, and intentionally created physical texture while considering the form, shape, surface, and organization of the composition as a whole.
Most importantly, the final work must communicate a concept developed from the student's shrine and the process of investigating it.
By this point, students have repeatedly encountered many of the same visual ideas under different conditions. The Final Project asks them to determine which of those ideas matter now, how they can be transformed, and how they can be used to communicate something personally meaningful.
Foundational knowledge is no longer simply something students have learned. It becomes something they can retrieve, adapt, transform, and use independently.
Student Artwork | Shrine Inventory and Final Project
The student develops imagery first explored in the Shrine and thumbnails into a final mixed-media composition centered on a large green eye. Layers of collaged text, painted marks, repeated linear patterns, and contrasting fields of warm and cool color surround the eye, while areas of black interrupt and connect the composition. The final work demonstrates how imagery and visual information gathered through the Shrine process can be selected, transformed, and reconstructed into a new composition.
The Assignment Sheet
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