While Colleen Choquette-Raphael was in graduate school, she was the only female in her class. Her class often had critiques on their work and she was told one day not to create any work with flowers.

“Flowers are a metaphor and a very powerful symbol,” Choquette-Raphael said. “It’s easy to dismiss the significance of the symbol.”

Choquette-Raphael spoke Feb. 18 in Yeager Recital Hall about her art exhibit in Arts West, “Write/Writhe,” as well as other pieces she’s done in the past.

Choquette-Raphael is based in Eugene, Ore., where she teaches in the photography department at the University of Oregon. She studied both art history and art education as an undergraduate and received her MFA in photography from the University of Washington.

Choquette-Raphael said she has always been interested in making work with flowers. When people call her pieces “flowery,” she said they say it in a demeaning way. The symbol of the flower is lined with femininity. It is an object of beauty, but can be dangerous when applied to the term “delicacy.”

Choquette-Raphael said she would like to transform what the word “feminist” means. The flower is a symbol of her support for women.

Something unique to Choquette-Raphael’s art is her use of connecting narrative to art.

“That’s my first love,” Choquette-Raphael said of narrative. “I manifest it in new form.”

She explained that she never works alone because she’s always imagining literary figures behind her.

“They’re whispering in my ear,” Choquette-Raphael said. “I look to writers such as Virginia Woolf and Oscar Wilde.”

Another underlying inspiration to her work is Italy.

“I have a great affection for surrealists and magical realism,” Choquette-Raphael said. She taught a class in Italy and her art history degree has an emphasis in Italian Renaissance.

Choquette-Raphael uses heavily loaded symbols, such as the flower or a ballerina, to make feminism a visible sight and remind people of the history of women.

One of her pieces contains a two-column list of ideas with the word desire in between the two. The desire serves as the gel between the two columns.

The right side of her list is ideas that have to do with the presence of society, while the other side is the lack of presence. Some examples include mind over body, light over shadow and logos over delirium.

“Who we are, this idea of desiring to be a light force, is the gel that exists between the structure of that language set up for us,” Choquette-Raphael said.

Colin McNally, a senior art major, listened to Choquette-Raphael talk about her use of narrative as digital art. He said senior year art majors do a senior thesis and their project restrictions are almost limitless.

“It is what you make it,” he said. “Narratives aren’t all that important to me in my work, but I know a lot of my fellow seniors right now are working on our senior thesis projects and are doing a story within our work.”

McNally said although their work is different, there is that story underneath. One of his classmates’ work deals with stories through collage. A different student’s work deals with stories through textiles and other mixed media. No two pieces of art are ever the same, which is what makes it art, he said.

Choquette-Raphael said even though she is an artist now, she was not an art or art history major. She was more of a reader, which is where her artwork will continue to stem from, she said.

Choquette-Raphael’s exhibit will be on display in Arts West through Tuesday, March 12.