Ariyonna Chapman-Macrum BFA Intermedia Thesis Spring 2024
Ariyonna Macrum’s mom was a body piercer in Bend, Oregon, she had a belly
button piercing before they became everything. Ariyonna loves the holes left in her
mom’s skin 20 years later, working through this admiration in a love letter to an
imagined past. What was it like to be pregnant for the first time? To abandon her youth?
Their work references that body in abstraction. Drawing attention to emptiness and
fullness in the same breath, not as two opposite points but as the same feeling. Even if
Ariyonna’s name means nothing to the world, their practice in ceramics ensures their
mother and her legacy will never be forgotten.