Sarah Hatton:::

Stratification: An MFA thesis exhibition

Top of viewing kiosk showing student work

My MFA thesis show was called Stratification. It involved solo and collaborative works that I made using the Situated Multimedia Arts Learning Lab (SMALLab). The show involved artworks inspired by concepts of figurative language and linguistics. The name Stratification refers to the various layers of memories and meanings we have in our mind that relate to the way people construct language. The show included works made by local English Language Learning high school students. Their works were compositions made with the SMALLab’s embodied and mediated capabilities and they resulted in twelve unique animations about English Idioms. I also made works relating to English idioms, as well as an interactive piece called Hybrid Word Gardens which was influenced by Sydney Lamb’s theories of language stratification.

The pieces in my show include:

1. Embodied Poetry Idioms by Mrs. Tuominen’s and Mr. Garcia’s class
2. Embodied Poetry Idioms about Gardens by Sarah Hatton
3. Say It Like You Movie It: a Documentary on how to create embodied digital poetry
4. Embodied Poetry Idioms by various embodied poetry workshop attendees
5. Hybrid Word Gardens: View all of the hybrid gardens HERE

This post shows documentation from the opening and closing receptions.

Hybrid Word Gardens in Action from Sarah Hatton on Vimeo.

A participant drops seeds and waits for them to grow into a new word garden

A participant drops seedpods to grow a word garden

An example of a finished hybrid word garden with many funny, fake hybrid words

The start screen shows a short animation of a girl dropping a seed pod with the orange glowball

people check out the student works and the documentary video

Show attendees try to guess the idiom represented: See the Light