Genius Loci

Publication Design | Typography | Visual Identity | Installation Design
Completed at MICA, 2022
Project Advisors: Jennifer Cole Phillips, Ellen
Lupton, Rachel Willey

Special Thanks to: Abraham Burickson, Glen Cummings, Jeremy Hoffman, Abbott Miller, Silas Munro, and Bobby Joe Smith III

Many thanks to Sam Raduns for Risograph printing guidance, assistance, and troubleshooting!

People build deep connections to places. Our bodies are clocks tuned to the seasons and senses of a place. What we feel, see, hear, smell, and taste becomes part of us.

My graduate thesis project was an expedition into the ties between place and memory through botany, mixology, and design. I began with foraging and documenting native plant species from a place steeped in my own family history: the town my grandparents live in. I then used those plant specimens to distill my own amaro, a traditional Italian digestif with deep ties to terroir.

Botanical posters featuring hand-cut Risograph-printed illustrations interspersed with foraging notes and narrative pieces come together in a mapped exhibition that forms an ecosystem of place and memory, a creative process that deepened my essential relationship with this place.

Borrowing an idea from Neal Stephenson, I sought to “condense meaning from the vapor of memory” and distill the essence of a place that is such a huge part of my life… the genius loci.