Book and Paper Commons^™

Texas Gothic, Taryn Uribe Turner

Art Theses and Dissertations

The emotional and the ecological combine to create my body of work titled, “Texas Gothic.” My thesis tells the stories of my oil paintings created through personal connections to a variety of landscapes, animals and experiences that share the setting of Texas.

Desire and regret take shape as animals and figures not fully formed or real. Unreliable narratives of the past are entangled with present tensions to create a painting that haunts and stalks.

And yet, there is hope!

Through nostalgia and sweetness and burdens, my paintings confront a shrouded future. The contradictions of time passing are explored in my …

Soul Furnace / فرن الأرواح, Isa Ghanayem

Masters Theses

“This is the good washing, this is (the washing) which separates the dirty body from the pure body. This is like silver mixed with lead, it is separated from it by this (process): one makes for it a cupel of bones, which is what is called the “head of the dog” and of which the common name is kūja-which is the crucible—and this must be made of burnt bones. One melts the silver in it, one gives it a strong fire: the cupel will absorb and receive the lead, the fire will make its subtle (part) fly away and extirpate …

Making Then Meaning, Ben Denzer

Masters Theses

This is an artist talk contained within a book. It is 816 pages and 49 minutes long. Closed captions run across the spreads. A video of this talk can be watched on bendenzer.com/making-then-meaning

At RISD, I’ve been prompted to expand the scope and tools of my practice and to reflect on questions of meaning in my work.

I spend my days making things, but I’ve never really had good answers to questions of why I make the things I make, or what their meaning is. I don’t think there are simple answers to these questions.

I think meaning comes from …

A Presence Of P____ And W__Th, Riley Wilson

Masters Theses

This body of work examines the involvement of association as it relates to our cultural interpretations of natural phenomena. Flowers and animals, both real and imagined, have been used as symbols for human morality since the beginning of human history. Two sources with which I drew inspiration from are medieval bestiaries and the Victorian practice of flower language. By combining elements from these references, I aim to pair this idea about the human need for classification with my own considerations about my identity. In combination, I also aim to highlight the responsibility that is intrinsic to curiosity. When faced with …

Legends Of Light: Crafting Middle Grade Fantasy In The Tradition Of Catholic Philosophy And Medieval Visual Culture, Bernadette Lamb

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This essay promotes the writing and illustrating of middle grade literature that mirrors the wonder-inducing experiences of leafing through an illuminated manuscript and stepping into a Gothic cathedral. An examination of Catholic medieval visual culture moves into a discussion on its underlying philosophy and theology, which are profoundly centered on relational healing and the dignity of the human person. Christian writers including St. Pope John Paul II, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Josef Pieper, Madeline L’Engle, Dr. Bob Schuchts, Makoto Fujimura, and Andrew Peterson inform an exploration of mercy, forgiveness, and love as self-gift in the context of illustration and storytelling …

The Process Of Publishing A Crow Book, Claire L. Curry

University Honors Theses

This creative thesis consists of a book on crows in urban environments and an accompanying craft essay exploring the publishing process of the book.

The crow book explores crows in urban environments, where cities offer them warmth and protection from predators. Crows are intelligent; they’re able to recognize human faces. Their diet often overlaps human food sources, which has led to historical conflict. Crows also have a strong presence in human culture. For these reasons, they thrive in cities, and this creates a complex relationship since people also have concerns regarding noise, cleanliness, and aesthetics.

The craft essay reflects on …

A Perfect Escape: Fantasy, Place And Narrative In Adolescence, Cydney Cherepak

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This essay explores the realms of special places, the literary genre of fantasy, narrative, and comics. These topics are traversed alongside subjects of adolescence and the creation of stories for middle-grade readers. Framed with personal stories, as well as peaks into my process, I investigate these subjects through the lens of my own life and work, specifically my thesis project, a comic for middle-grade readers titled Beyond the Castle Walls. Beginning with adolescence in association with special places, I consider the work of developmental psychologists David Sobel and Edith Cobb as they pin-point the role of secret forts, nature, …

Meet Me In The Middle Ages: Engaging With Fantasy, Reality, And Collaborative World-Building, Amanda Greene

MFA in Illustration & Visual Culture

This critical essay accompanies and describes my thesis project, Medievalia Miscellany, a magazine for middle-grade readers which explores the world of medieval fantasy through art, comics, stories, and activities. Throughout the essay, I use my own term “archaeological upcycling” to discuss and explore a variety of relationships between ideas of parts and a whole. I then use it to characterize the way stories are created out of many different parts and how these parts help a reader to relate to both the world of the story and the world in which they live. I describe the genre of medieval fantasy …

Plant Wise, Sophia Llamas

Honors Projects

Conceptually, Plant Wise is the key to bridging the gap between preconceived ideas about vegan and vegetarianism and successfully integrating plant-based foods into your everyday life. Physically, Plant Wise is a self-educational, interactive booklet chock-full of activities intended for users to complete at their own pace. Inside this 56-page booklet, there are recipes, doodling spaces, weekly check sheets, activities to do with friends and family, challenges, and so much more. Plant Wise utilizes these activities and journaling opportunities throughout as a self-reflective vehicle to give users an experience to reflect on, which aids in the retention of what’s been learned …

The Artist's Diary, Anamae Gilroy

Senior Projects Spring 2022

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Arts of Bard College.

Spectrum Of Shit, Hannah Hiaasen

Theses and Dissertations

Contending with the loss of a parent to a mass shooting in their workplace, a newsroom, I find myself suspended in time, in an office. Post-its, fans, button-ups, snow globes, clipboards, reporters notebooks, scrap paper, jot downs, keyboards hold me up. I crave the comfort of repetitive cumulative hand work. Quilting, weaving, and cutting away help me breathe, haptically process and memorialize these grieving objects, this grieving person. Weed-wacking towards intimacy, my work employs a range of materials to mourn the mundanity of a workday, fantasize transformative justice, and steward embodied grief to the surface. My only speed is slow-- …

The Mvohc Project, Brooke Day

All Theses

ABSTRACT

A Mvohc is a Morphic Vessel of Human Consciousness. The Mvohc Project traverses' theories of spatial identity in tandem with creative world-building as a method for examining the intricacies of the human condition and reimagining reality. My creations are designed to promote autonomy over the contemporary world's ever-evolving societal complexities to empower individuals, foster imagination and communication, and create space for positive change. This body of work incorporates fleshy biomorphic sculptures inspired by science fiction, deep-sea marine life, and the human body. The abject creatures are partnered with constructed audio-scapes that encompass the frenzy of an overarching internal monologue, …

Accumulations Of (Not) Doing, Richenda Cope

Masters Theses

As I encounter life during a global pandemic, caused by a virus that has us all homebound, I continue my own struggle with a different virus that keeps me not only homebound, but bed bound as well. In this thesis project, I make my way around and through the questions of chronic illness, self-worth, productivity and a changing relationship to time that arise in this dual viral experience - situating the personal within a larger social/political context.

Material Encounters: Making Memory Beyond The Mind, Ariel Wills

Masters Theses

Can acts of making carry the memories of our embeddedness within the world? This thesis explores how making things can nurture a sense of kinship that cuts across the organic and inorganic, erasing the distinction between living and dead, material and spiritual. Through handwork such as art-making, sewing, knitting, cooking, woodworking, and beyond, the burden of remembering and of archiving is shared across human and non-human bodies, cultivated through practices of making, and through the materials themselves. By recounting the stories of my family’s experience as Jewish immigrants in the United States, I aim to reveal how their domestic practices …

The Infinite Crisis: How The American Comic Book Has Been Shaped By War, Winston Andrus

War, Diplomacy, and Society (MA) Theses

This thesis project argues that war has been the greatest catalyst for the American comic book medium to become a socio-political change agent within western society. Comic books have become one of the most pervasive influences to global popular culture, with superheroes dominating nearly every popular art form. Yet, the academic world has often ignored the comic book medium as a niche market instead of integrated into the broader discussions on cultural production and conflict studies. This paper intends to bridge the gap between what has been classified as comic book studies and the greater academic world to demonstrate the …

Journal, Untitled, Angelo Chammah

Senior Projects Spring 2020

This journal has no owner.
It is simply out there.
It belongs to me, it belongs to you.
It is about personal moments but universal experiences.
What do you see when you drive with the window open?
What can you find in your own house?
What light is on at midnight?

Angelo Chammah

From The Dirt Up: Layering Story, Place, And Environmentalism Within Three Picture Books, Lucinda Rowe

Children's Book Writing and Illustrating (MFA) Theses

The world is changing before our eyes – species are going extinct, the amount of habitat available to wildlife has decreased, and children are spending less time outside than in the past. Through analyzing environmental ideology within early childhood education and children’s literature, I demonstrate that picture books can inspire nature conservation, appreciation, and stewardship by encouraging outdoor play and exploration. I compare picture books that successfully demonstrate eco-consciousness without being didactic, how my thesis fits within the current environmental movement, and how it helps stretch the definition of what is considered eco-writing.

This thesis consists of three illustrated picture …

Transit, Christopher Janke

Masters Theses

This written thesis, transit, accompanies an exhibition by the same name and serves to contextualize the exhibit. The written portion begins with an inquiry into the nature of the contextualization itself, questioning the nature of the relationship between the written thesis, the exhibit, and the University which explicitly requires and connects the two, especially the ways that the written word as granted authority through an institution of higher education might undermine the exhibit’s intent to provoke thought into other forms of knowledge and other avenues of legitimacy than those presented by this institution.

The thesis discusses the philosophic question sometimes …

Sonder: Exploration Of The Relationship Between Digital Media And Graphic Design Through The Creation Of Print And Digital Publications, Elisa Leigh Vandergriff

Undergraduate Honors Theses

Sonder is an exploration of the relationship between digital media and graphic design through the creation of print and digital publications. At it’s very foundation, Sonder is a travel magazine with both a physical print publication and a digital publication designed for a tablet. It includes photography, articles, poetry, and travel tips. The print and the digital versions contain the same content, but explore different methods of presentation.

Experience Bobo Experience, Sara Smith

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Experience Bobo Experience -by Sara Marie Smith (Artist Statements and Images of work)

Spring 2018-CSUMB Undergraduate Capstone Project/ Visual Public Arts Department

My Senior Capstone is about using inspirational wisdom from acknowledged sources to address the quandaries of our human experiences. I have chosen a cognitive clown, named Bobo, to investigate Henry David Thoreau, Jack Kerouac, and Allen Watts. Bobo, my character, goes on a journey of learning. Bobo is a line drawing, rendered in marker, with a circular head, two dot eyes, three puffs of hair with a clown smile and clown clothing. Experience Bobo Experience speaks to …

Good Game, Greyory Blake

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis and its corresponding art installation, Lessons from Ziggy, attempts to deconstruct the variables prevalent within several complex systems, analyze their transformations, and propose a methodology for reasserting the soap box within the display pedestal. In this text, there are several key and specific examples of the transformation of various signifiers (i.e. media-bred fear’s transformation into a political tactic of surveillance, contemporary freneticism’s transformation into complacency, and community’s transformation into nationalism as a state weapon). In this essay, all of these concepts are contextualized within the exponential growth of new technologies. That is to say, all of these semiotic …

La Vida Y Andanzas De Un Libro Antiguo En Nueva España Y La Península Ibérica. Cultura Escrita En La Obra Hierofánica Del Doctor Don Alonso Alberto De Velasco, Raul Manuel Lopez Bajonero

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In 1688 a legal text, Renovación, was printed in Mexico City, the capital of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, that explains a twelve year trial that focuses on determining if a 16^th century sculpture miraculously renewed itself. The final decision came from the Archbishop of Mexico City. A year after the book’s publication, the sculpture was recognized as miraculous. In 1699, ten years after this event, the author of Renovación wrote another book that narrates the same sculpture's history, Exaltación, but addressed a wider audience, and from a religious and pious perspective. The Exaltación was republished a …

Phobophobia: A Study In Fear, Rebecca C. Josephson

Senior Honors Projects, 2010-2019

This thesis is the poetic culmination of a creative writing study in fear. Though here it only consists of the written word, the thesis was the content of an artists book of the same study.

Master Buddha & The Jolly Golly Fun Time Gang., Todd Edward Evans

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis is the first two chapters of a novel. The novel parodies the capitalist and consumerist United States of the 21st Century in the tradition of Thomas Pynchon, Kurt Vonnegut, and Donald Barthelme.

Nostos: On Recollecting Loss And The Physical Manifestation Of Loss, Stephanie M. Huang

Scripps Senior Theses

This paper examines nostalgia in photo-poetry book Nostos, and nostalgia’s existence as a theoretical global condition arising from displacement, looking at nostalgia specifically not as a yearning for home, but a yearning for a lost sense of feeling at home. It traces the lineage of image-text hybrid art practices and examines the significance of conveying meaning through both synergistically. It studies the psychoanalytic process of transforming loss into object, or absence into presence, ultimately using the object as a lens to view oneself and the way in which nostalgia manifests itself.

The Call Of The Undertow, Rebekah Bradford

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Artist Statement

Prior to becoming a graphic design student, I was very interested in illustration. I wanted an opportunity to hone my illustration skills, focus on one consistent style of illustration, consistently draw the same characters, and practice writing. Creating a children’s book gave me the opportunity to do all of those things. And, after several semesters of work, it’s great to finally see The Call of the Undertow completed! I hope that you enjoy reading this story and looking at the images because I enjoyed creating it.

Creative Collaboration On A Creativity Book, Jane Harvey

Creativity and Change Leadership Graduate Student Master's Projects

Based on existing roles as writer and designer, two Master’s students partnered on one project. This project was dually about the creative product and creative process. The final product result is a book on creativity, but much of the project learning was about collaboration during the creative process itself. The project included the creation of written and visual content and a production-ready book layout on the subject of creativity. This paper describes the process followed to create a fast reading, jargon-free book with a special academic end section.

The Misconception Of Knowing, The Invention Of Time; Curiosities & Introspections Of Vernacular Photography, Patricia D. Drummond

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

The Misconception of Knowing, the Invention of Time; Curiosities & Introspections of Vernacular Photography is a body of work that combines photography, artist books, and alternative processes in a series of pieces that explore the synergy between the act of creating vernacular or common photography, the photograph in its many forms, and the interaction with the photographic image at all the stages of its existence. It also exists in conjunction with this written monograph, which supports and gives insight into the work. Through the use of poems, sketchbook musings, the history of photography, critical theory and social norms within photography, …

The Lost Row, Roman Buetel

Honors Projects

Set in 2032, The Lost Row chronicles the pre-dystopian city of Fostoria, where three citizens have taken it upon themselves to combat crime.

The Hat Lady Equation, Lauren Capone

University of New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

The Hat Lady Equation is a collection of poems by Lauren Capone. As influences she cites Elizabeth Bishop, John Berryman, among the exquisite minutiae of day-to-day living. The poems explore works of visual art by Alberto Giacometti, James Taylor Bonds, Chris Dennis, Blaine Capone (her brother), and creatures of the natural world including fish, the rhinoceros, a lettered olive shell. . . . Lauren shows a preoccupation with disassembling through the poems whether it's her identity, art, or happenings of everyday life.