Entropic Communion

Author

• Lorna Williams, Virginia Commonwealth UniversityFollow

Defense Date

2026

Document Type

Thesis

Degree Name

Master of Fine Arts

Department

Sculpture + Extended Media

First Advisor

Jeremy Touissaint-Baptiste

Second Advisor

Lily Cox Richard

Third Advisor

Michael Jones Mckean

Fourth Advisor

Susie Ganch

Abstract

I came to this work through dissolution. A career that extracted something essential. Years of self-destruction. The question of whether making was still possible from inside what I had become. This thesis is the attempt at an answer. I work with electroformed copper cacti, salvaged industrial materials, programmable smart film, bass transducers, periscopes, and sepia-toned mirrored surfaces—materials that already know something about damage and endurance. I draw on the mythology of Echo and Narcissus as a structural and autobiographical framework: I am the carcass, the flower, and the devoted higher self simultaneously. The gallery is a gravesite in the New Orleans tradition—the dead kept close, the altar maintained, the relationship continuing past death. Decay is a kinetic force. The electroforming bath is a ritual. The recordings pulsed through water are a severed voice transmuted into frequency. The thesis argues that entropy is not disorder but generative force—that decay, severance, and dissolution are the conditions under which transformation becomes possible, and that the self that is consumed does not return but leaves behind something that could not have existed without the consuming. This thesis traces the development of the work from candidacy through the thesis exhibition, engaging Hortense Spillers, Fred Moten, Georges Bataille, Édouard Glissant, Robin Wall Kimmerer, Audre Lorde, José Muñoz, Frantz Fanon, Gaston Bachelard, and Saidiya Hartman—not as decoration but as confirmation of what the making already knew. Genuine communion does not require full transparency. Contact on one's own terms is both a political act and a condition for survival.

Rights

© The Author

Is Part Of

VCU University Archives

Is Part Of

VCU Theses and Dissertations

Date of Submission

5-8-2026