Sarah Sharp, Associate Professor, Department of Visual Arts
Sarah Sharp was awarded the 2025 CIRCA Research Fellowship, which provides two course releases for her to focus on completing a new body of textile-based artworks currently titled We Who Warm the Moon. This is a series of large-scale textile based banner-like sculptural objects that reference “winding cloths” or death shrouds, and represent objects for mourning personal losses and environmental devastation. This series directly builds on Professor Sharp’s recent creative project titled “Pattern Recognition,” which involved research into the histories of various historical textile and architecturally based design motifs. Examples include ancient tile patterns, American quilt traditions, and cross-stitch imagery. Her research from “Pattern Recognition” garnered a new series of needlepoints titled “Legacies” that I have scanned and tiled into larger, potentially infinite, patterns to be printed on fabrics. We Who Warm the Moon uses these textiles and other experimental techniques as the basis for new artworks. This new research direction and body of work will be part of a solo show, alongside other new work, at the University of Southern Indiana’s New Harmony Gallery of Contemporary Art in Winter 2025 -2026.
Colette Searls, Professor, Department of Theatre
Colette Searls was awarded the 2025 CIRCA Pedagogy Fellowship, which provides two course releases for her to focus on developing a new course, Monsters, Aliens, and Robots: Global Performance of the Non-human. This course will examine non-human characters in fictional performances across time and culture. Drawing on puppetry’s intersection of visual arts, theatre, music, and dance, it will expose students to a diverse range of performance traditions such as Japanese bunraku, Nigerian gelede puppetry, and Bamana masquerade. Students will study connections between these traditions and the students’ own experiences with pop culture creatures in contemporary epics like Harry Potter, Black Panther, and Star Wars. This interdisciplinary course, intended for all arts students, will arise from new research into global forms as well as the contemporary scholarship coalesced and proposed in Professor Searls’ recent book, A Galaxy of Things: the Power of Puppets and Masks in Star Wars and Beyond (Routledge 2023). Students will conduct independent research, write, and create performances in groups, drawing on skills from their disciplines to collaborate with classmates and apply sharper critical thinking. Themes of cultural appropriation, portrayal of the cultural “other,” and how to “critique what you love” will also be explored.