Abstract

This thesis explores how Charbonneau’s queerness revealed a fundamental contradiction in Mormon doctrine, initiating an unmooring that allowed a reconsideration of the faith’s sacred symbols they carried. As they moved away, these objects became fragmented artifacts: haunting, obsolete, and open to reinterpretation. Their meanings shifted as they were held through time, remembered, and translated, accumulating traces of the holder like sound shaped by the acoustics of a room. Through sculpture and installation, Charbonneau examines this transformation and the new orientations it makes possible. Unmooring becomes both subject and method: a way to loosen rigid systems, blur inherited boundaries, and generate a personal, mutable sense of sacredness outside institutional authority.