Rhyming the Land

with Hai-Wen Lin & Manal Shoukair
SCULPTURE 688 001 | 3 credits | $175 lab fee
July 21–August 2, 2025

This course is an exploration of land art, installation, and performance art that uses poetry as a framework to think about sculpting. As a class, we will consider the poem and its elements (rhyme, meter, metaphor) as form, material, and method. We will have daily writing and making exercises to develop a relationship between language, land, and our bodies. Techniques demonstrated will include mold making, cyanotype, field recording, movement mapping, kite making, and writing performative scores. This is not necessarily a poetry class, but a class of poetic making. It will entail listening, walking, sharing, caring, speaking, humming, singing, dancing, and meditating as forms of writing and research. We hope to challenge conventional understandings of the separation between body and environment by situating ourselves directly within the land. We will consider the works of artists such as Ana Mendieta, Richard Long, Andy Goldsworthy, Francis Alÿs, amongst others. Readings may include Audre Lorde, Etel Adnan, Robin Wall Kimmerer. The final project is the construction of a duet poem wherein one part originates from the artist’s body and one part originates from the landscape.

Hai-Wen Lin, River Lumen, 2022, unfixed silver gelatin print, 8 × 10 in.

Hai-Wen Lin  (they/them) is a Taiwanese-American artist based somewhere between the earth and sky. Their work explores constructions of the body and the attunement of one’s self to the environment, often working through metaphor, etymologies, sunlight, wind, and the way time passes perfectly when you are out walking on a beautiful day. Lin is an alumnus of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and earned a MDes in Fashion, Body and Garment from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. They are one of the American Craft Council’s 2024 Emerging Artists, a 2023 CFDA Fashion Future Graduate, and are a recipient of the Hopper Prize and fellowships from MacDowell, Vermont Studio Center, Lighthouse Works, and the Ox-Bow School of Art & Artist Residency. Lin has exhibited work at the Chinese American Museum of Chicago, the San Jose Museum of Quilts and Textiles, the Pittsburgh Glass Center, the walls of their home, their friend’s home, on a plate, on a lake, on their body, in the sky.

Manal Shoukair, below her, 2022, solid bronze and nylon, dimensions variable

Manal Shoukair (she/her) is a Lebanese-American artist whose work in video performance, sculpture, and site-specific installations explore the complex intersectionality of her multicultural identity, Islamic spirituality, and contemporary femininity. Shoukair’s installation work directs the viewer in space that is only partially physically accessible, forcing the feeling of being left out or cut off. It prompts the viewer to explore a space physically, psychologically, and culturally; methodologies that parallel her intuitive practice. The work navigates a conscious space of being and reflection of place and directs awareness inward, engulfing its audience in the stillness of its gesture. Manal has been featured in art publications, including Hyperallergic, Sculpture Magazine, and the Detroit Metro Times. Manal holds a BFA from the College for Creative Studies in Detroit and is a recent MFA graduate from the Sculpture and Extended Media Department at Virginia Commonwealth University. She is a recipient of the Master’s Thesis Grant from Virginia Commonwealth University, the Gilda Award from the Kresge Foundation, the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Fellowship and the MacDowell Fellowship.