Pulp Translations: Paperworks from George Mason MFA Alumni

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PULP TRANSLATIONS:
Paperworks from George Mason MFA Alumni

April 6–June 26, 2026 @ Fenwick Gallery

Pulp Translations brings together work by alumni artists from GMU who use paper as both material and conceptual ground. Working across printmaking, artists' books, sculpture, and installation, these artists approach paper as a surface and a medium through which experiences, ideas, and identities are translated into new physical forms.

At the core of the exhibition is the act of translation itself. Some of the artists work by casting paper pulp over other objects or materials, or by manipulating the pulp into forms, creating new sculptural objects that carry evidence of their origins. Others treat paper as an artform itself, presented in its raw forms or manipulated through folding, sewing, and collage. Repetition, accumulation, and variation allow images and ideas to move across formats—page, object, and space—creating works that are at once intimate and expansive.

The featured artists are all MFA graduates from George Mason’s College of Visual and Performing Arts: Ceci Cole McInturff (MFA 2016), Emily Fussner (MFA 2019), Jennifer Lillis (MFA 2019), Kate Fitzpatrick (MFA 2020), and Jayne Matricardi (MFA 2021). McInturff, Lillis, and Fussner were also previously graduate assistants for Fenwick Gallery.

Installation view, “Pulp Transformations”

Featured Works

Contributing Artists

Kate Fitzpatrick

My work exists in the gap between text and art. Signs serve as building blocks of communication, conveying layers of interpretation. I seek to unravel the complexities of these signs, examining how they shape and reflect individual and collective identities. “Language” in my art, both illegible and unspoken, becomes the surface upon which I construct and negotiate those explorations. This visual dialogue invites viewers to contemplate the nuances of language and its role in shaping our sense of self and belonging to uncover deeper meanings that lie beneath the surface.

Biography

Kate Fitzpatrick grew up in a family of travelers, moving frequently and encountering many cultures and languages. Often feeling like an outsider, she became interested in how signs and symbols create systems of meaning. Working primarily with traditional media like pen and ink, she also incorporates materials such as thread, acetate, and fabric to produce intricate drawings, paintings, artist books, and installations that explore her own graphic language.

Emily Fussner

What if the mundane periphery of our lives can be a site for transformation, a threshold of poetic possibility? I am fascinated by how cracks in paths or parking lots record time and reveal tension. I crouch down close to these cracks, filling them—sometimes with fallen petals, often with paper pulp. Working on my hands and knees in these transitional spaces is a prayer, a gesture of care and mending. I make the gaps tangible, translating absence into presence.

Born with the brittle bone condition Osteogenesis Imperfecta, I bring a deeply personal understanding of fracture and repair to my process. I use handformed abaca pulp deliberately: abaca paper is delicate yet surprisingly strong, like the human body. Embedding a copper wire as a skeleton allows the paper to lift from the site, keeping the shape of that fracture: a 1:1 map with dirt clinging to the fiber. It folds to become a vessel of only cracks, unfolds and casts shadows. I make Cyanotypes to record the shadows and render them in light—a further translation and transformation—developing drawings and mixed-media works by tracing additional shadow layers. These forms become metaphors for healing, icons of resilience and tenderness.

Biography

Emily Fussner is an artist whose work highlights peripheral patterns in everyday spaces, exploring questions of transience and presence, fragility and strength, perception and care. She holds an MFA in Visual Arts from George Mason University (2019) and received a 2018-2019 VMFA graduate fellowship award. Enjoying a variety of arts-related work, she managed large-scale artist and collector events for Washington Project for the Arts for six years, occasionally teaches and curates, and regularly freelance designs publications and exhibition catalogs. Fussner has exhibited mostly throughout the Washington, DC area and is currently a long-term resident artist at Museum of Contemporary Art Arlington.

Jennifer Lillis

Biography

Jennifer Lillis is a multi-disciplinary visual artist, educator, and administrator based in Northern Virginia. She received her MFA in Visual Art and Technology from George Mason University, and her BA in Studio Art from Marymount University. Jennifer is the Assistant Curator and Gallery Manager at the McLean Project for the Arts, teaches Printmaking at George Mason University, co-producer of Paper Cuts, and founder of the print and book collective ELEMENTS. 

Jayne Matricardi

My art practice explores the psychological landscape of motherhood and caregiving, with an emphasis on unseen and undervalued labor. In my most recent body of work I pull bits and pieces of imagery from historical tintypes and family photographs of mothers and children. My creative process involves hidden and laborious translations from one medium to the next; multiple iterations and derivations, weaving back and forth between analog and digital. I start with high resolution scanning of photographs, which reveals often unnoticed scratches, dust, damage and signs of wear.

Zooming in and isolating certain sections, I render the images as photo-realistic graphite drawings on vellum. After scanning the drawings, I ultimately re-present the images in a variety of ways such as collaged prints, inked fabric, video projections, and artist’s books. Through my work, I honor and give presence to mothers, and caregivers whose daily labor is frequently ignored, or overlooked.

Biography

Originally from Baltimore, Maryland, Jayne teaches and creates art just outside Washington D.C. She earned a bachelor’s degree with dual majors in painting and art history from the University of Virginia in 1996. After a brief career as a web designer for the Washington Post, Jayne earned a master’s degree in education from The George Washington University in 2001. In 2021, she earned a master’s degree in fine art from George Mason University. For the past 24 years, she has been an art educator at the high school level in Fairfax, Virginia. She currently teaches painting, drawing, and digital photography at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology.

Ceci Cole McInturff

I am a sculptor, paper and book artist whose materials reference spiritual ecology - wisdoms within nature which humans can learn from to adapt or survive longer.

My primary materials are organic ephemera – plant and animal materials, without synthetics or technology. Most works exhibit as installations, often are suspended, and show indoors and out. In cases of outdoor installation, the materials are left outdoors to wear away over time back to where they came from.

All my work seeks to expand definitions of beauty, demonstrate interconnectedness and linked well-being between species, and imply sacred within the natural. The aesthetic of wabi-sabi finds wisdom and beauty in things just as they are, usefully challenging maker and viewer to say or perceive more while using less. Across all materials, this impacts my work. 

Biography

Ceci Cole McInturff works in cross-media sculpture, most often using provocative combinations of organic ephemera: untreated plant and animal material.

A member of the Otis Street Arts Project and founder of the former 87FLORIDA non-profit exhibit and performance space–both in Washington, D.C.—she holds an MFA in Art and Visual Technology from George Mason University; completed two years of MA/Art and the Book at the Corcoran College of Art + Design; is a former executive with the CBS Television Network; and mother of two sons.

She maintains two full-time studios in VA/DC/MD area including one with Otis Street Arts Project. She has shown work in U.S. galleries and universities on both coasts, most recently the NARS Foundation and Brooklyn Waterfront Artist Coalition in NYC, at Hudson Valley MoCA, and in the DC-area’s Katzen Center for the Arts at American University, the Athenaeum, Tephra Institute of Contemporary Art, McLean Project for the Arts, VisArts, at George Mason University’s Fairfax and Arlington galleries and its Fenwick Library, and at Maryland Art Place in Baltimore.