MFA Thesis Exhibition 2026

The MFA in Craft Media facilitates the exploration of ceramics, fibre, glass or jewellery and metals through autonomous practice-led research, in an intensive 20-month program. Mentored by internationally acclaimed artists and scholars, students produce a body of work and research that expands the field of contemporary craft.

Samira Ahmadizadeh – Light in Darkness

Light in Darkness explores hope and resilience as lived, embodied forces shaped by histories of hardship, endurance and spiritual reflection within Iranian culture. Growing up amid uncertainty and displacement, I frame hope not as passive optimism but as an active, evolving practice forged through resistance and perseverance. This exhibition draws on Rumi’s poetry and philosophy, where opposing forces coexist and give meaning to one another. Through this lens, my works explore darkness as a generative space where light emerges and transformation unfolds. Resilience becomes the ground from which hope is continually renewed.

Yukun Hao – Digital Translations: Bedrooms, Domestic Objects, and Belonging

Ling Ho is a Taiwanese artist based in Canada. Her practice explores communication beyond language through clay, sound, and movement.

Working with clay trimmings and fragments, she treats these materials as traces of gesture, time, and interaction rather than waste. Through collecting, firing, and reassembling, her process becomes a form of speaking, recording, and rewriting.

Her work reflects on the limits of language and the potential of pre-linguistic experience, creating installations that invite embodied forms of communication.

Gurpreet Kaur – Unfolding

Unfolding explores how intergenerational memory, care, and identity unfold through material practices. As I weave and embroider, I become part of the experience, questioning silence and exploring the unknown. Threads act as living conduits, connecting mother and daughter, past and present, while warp and weft become sites of unfolding. Through this process, memory, lineage, and relational knowledge come into being. Each knot, stitch, and color choice mediates tension, care, and continuity, creating a tactile dialogue where the maker and material coalesce. Through threads, I translate embodied experiences, allowing identity, home, and belonging to emerge and 
transform. I find myself entering a tactile dialogue that reflects the layered translations between self and culture.

Jordan Mitchell – Body Echoes

My work begins in echo: in the body’s sense of what is missing, doubled, or still lingering. Through ceramics, sound, installation, and digital image-making, I build spaces where forms seem to listen, where surfaces reflect imperfectly, and where objects hold traces of dependency, distance, and touch. Parabolic ears, suspended elements, and resonant vessels become quiet companions in a field of relation. I return to unwholeness not as lack, but as a way of knowing and being with others. These works invite viewers to lean closer, to linger in uncertainty, and to feel how recognition emerges through atmosphere, misalignment, and shared presence.

Monika Urbaniak – Touching Absence

Touching Absence examines how memory, loss, and orientation can be materialized through fibre and jewellery practices. Through weaving, metalwork, and installation, it translates photographic fragments, shifting woven structures, and forms that hold and release breath into tactile objects and environments. Drawing on phenomenology and memory studies, particularly the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Astrid Erll, Sara Ahmed, and Roland Barthes, the project proposes embodied craft as a method of reorientation after loss, allowing absence to emerge as a quiet but enduring presence.

Jesi Yager  – "Feet, what do I need them for if I have wings to fly”  — Frida Kahlo

I came to AUArts just four months after the amputation of my left foot liberated me from the intense pain of Complex Regional Pain Syndrome. Celebrating my return to glass, to mobility, to life, this body of work explores the highs and lows, my rediscovery of the nonlinearity of time where PTSD and pain alter perception, a kind of personal archeology as I unearthed memories and truths about my embodied experience, and my understandingthat my triumph is not an overcoming of disability but in claiming the creative potential generated by a lifetime in my non-normative body.

Jingjing (Ducula) Zhao – Contours of Coexistence

Contours of Coexistence brings together three works—Home within Home, Convenience Store, and Blue Glass Curtain Wall—to explore how the self takes shape within shared spaces. Rooted in my lived experience of growing up in China during the transition from the planned economy to the market era, the project weaves personal memory with collective history. Through autoethnography, research-creation, and practice-based methods, I work across weaving, sculpture, and painting to examine boundaries, comfort, and bodily perception. These works ask how identity is formed, negotiated, and protected within the social structures, spatial systems, and relationships that shape everyday life and memory today.