For two months Rosamond Casey (BFA ’76) stood in her Charlottesville, Virginia, studio with the curtains closed, her hands held behind her back, and a vacuum-cleaner brush tied to her toes.

Like an actor preparing for a role, Casey was exploring one of the 10 troubled characters featured in her mixed-media installation, Mapping the Dark: A Museum of Ambient Disorders. This particular character, an artist, harbors such fear that she will lose her hands in an accident that she practices painting with her feet.

Acting almost as a psychologist and anthropologist as well as an artist, Casey spent five years mining the depths of these 10 imagined people, writing their stories, making the art and objects they would have ostensibly left behind. The paintings, photographs, collages, and sculptures are arranged in beautifully precise landscapes, evidence of Casey's background in bookmaking and calligraphy. The installation is subtitled "visual fiction," yet Casey calls her characters " collaborators," and has created portraits so persuasive that the viewer wonders: are they real or not? "There have been some people scratching their heads," Casey says of the exhibition. "I wanted to have the authorship be ambiguous. The more ambiguous it is, the more compelling it will be."

Casey has moved on to her next project: a study of men who wear suits that involves photographs and translucent paintings on Plexiglass. But the Mapping the Dark material, which she has also crafted into a collection of small museum-quality books, now fuels a course in conceiving art that she offers at the McGuffey Art Center in Charlottesville. She also teaches calligraphy, papermaking, bookmaking, and a children's summer camp—hoping to impart to her students the willingness to take creative risks, just as she did with Mapping the Dark. "Every time I’d go down the rabbit hole of these characters' lives, I had no confidence in this thing coming together," Casey says. "Freefall is the condition you want to be in as an artist."