4 LEHIGH UNIVERSITY | COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCES design Binding Photography and Textiles Material meets the natural world in Anna Chupa’s studio. Chupa, professor of design and associate chair of the department of art, architecture, and design, combines photography montages with textiles to create unique quilts. Botanical quilts are one of Chupa’s ongoing projects. Rich colors splash across the surface of her fabric, which is printed with a collection of various flowers that have been manipulated in Photoshop. When creating the artwork she says, “The Photoshop work is so meditative for me.” Chupa is also creating textile designs that combine scans from electron microscopy and juxtaposing it with photography and macro photography of the same species. “The scanning electron microscope is so much fun to work with,” Chupa says, “and so interesting to work with, to see what you reveal underneath.” Scans were rendered at the Institute for Functional Materials and Devices and Robert Booth, professor and chair of the department of earth and environmental sciences (ESS), provides herbarium specimens. But that’s not the only collaborative project on which Chupa is working. She and Deirdre Murphy, professor of design in the department of art, architecture, and design, have a show planned for the Nurture Nature Center in Easton in 2027. This exhibition will showcase both of their creative work where art meets the biological sciences. Another layer of Chupa’s work are her art quilts of the Camino de Santiago, a medieval pilgrimage across northern Spain. Her quilts document the landscape and architecture of the Camino. She hiked the Camino twice, the first time in the summer of 2022 and then again in June 2024, carrying her cameras, photography lenses, and back-up drives along with her. Chupa was interested in learning why people do a pilgrimage and “how spirituality is revealed on the path along the way.” These quilts are like altars themselves and reminiscent of her photographs of altars created by New Orleans Voodoo Priestess Miriam Williams and her quilts inspired by Islamic architecture and tiles of southern Spain. Sandwiching backing fabric, batting, and a quilt top, Chupa creates intricate designs with a longarm quilting machine. “The advantage of working with a machine like this is that you drive it, and it’s using gross motor skills rather than pushing your fabric through a sewing machine,” Chupa explains. The result is densely quilted artwork with embroider-like patterns—layers that bind architecture and nature. english Reimagining the Round Table: Restoring Medievalisms of Contemporary Women Writers When imagining the Middle Ages, jousting arenas, turkey legs, and knights in shining armor often come to mind. However, this masculine, Westernized view of the medieval period excludes a wealth of diverse narratives and perspectives. Suzanne Edwards is changing that with a volume of essays on women’s medievalism that she’s co-editing with Matthew X. Vernon. “Medievalism includes representations of the Middle Ages in any moment after the Middle Ages from Spenser’s 16th century The Faerie Queene to the movie Camelot or even Games of Thrones,” Edwards, professor of English, explains, naming a few popular examples. Historically, scholarship on medievalism has often focused on the works of white male authors like Alfred Tennyson, T.H. White, and JRR Tolkien. “In attending to the history of medievalism, we’ve largely overlooked the contributions of women writers in particular,” Edwards says. “What we found in writing the book is often those contributions by women writers have not been recognized as medievalism or they have remained hidden in the archive.” In 10 essays and an introduction, Women’s Restorative Medievalisms: Forgotten Pasts and Unimagined Futures sheds light on these unrecognized medievalisms by women writers from the 20th and 21st centuries. “Women writers in their medievalisms call attention to histories of oppression as well as imagine alternative possibilities for the past that might lead us toward a different kind of future,” Edwards notes. For instance, Tracy Deonn’s young adult novel Legendborn is a popular contemporary example that Edwards Anna Chupa (above) and one of her quilts, Camino de Santiago (left). Christine Kreschollek HIGHLIGHTS
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