Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Windbound, Selina Kehuan Wu

Masters Theses

Can we navigate reality outside the constraints of chronological progression? As beings seemingly chained to linear time, can memory become a way to transcend this structure—to resist it, to time travel? What if time, instead of a line, is like the wind—non-linear, unpredictable, and both a force of creation and destruction?

Structured around three interwoven notions—the impulse to preserve (why), the forms that time takes (what), and the gestures through which we intervene (how)—this thesis explores how graphic design engages with the mutable, non-linear nature of time. The first notion, memory labor, considers the poetic and emotional …

Gesture And Trace, Luisa M. Heindl

Masters Theses

I approach type as both gesture and trace: something made and something read, impulse and afterimage, formed through action, reception, and reuse.

My work focuses on the smallest components of written narratives: the shapes that form and encase letters, and the typography that enhances the emotional and cultural resonance of text. I explore how type and language encode meaning through various lenses, whether through the ideological ‘freight’ of reviving or using historical styles, the emotional charge of certain forms, the possibilities of variable font technology, or the curated (and sometimes instrumentalized) narratives embedded in nostalgic-feeling visual trends.

Typographic expression embodies …

Moving With Mountains, Matthew Freeman

Masters Theses

Bodily experiences with stones can produce an experience of the sublime. Through the act of traversing a stone, we can reorient our sense of scale and situatedness in nature. In this thesis, I invoke natural forces of great magnitude in an intimate context, making portable the expansion of thinking that occurs when we imagine ourselves on and as surfaces resembling landscapes.

I have developed my methodology through fieldwork in gorges, beaches and museums, culminating in a study of the conventions of Scholar’s stones and the aesthetics of the sublime. I define the sublime in historical and contemporary contexts by analysing …

The Dialectic Of Airless Space, Ophelia Arc

Masters Theses

The Dialectic of Airless Space is a cumulative, cross-disciplinary research project that explores ‘airless space’ as a somatic and psychological condition shaped by institutional environments. Unfolding over time through five interrelated books, the project weaves together writing, ephemera, textile sculpture, and drawing to archive the invisible architectures of bodily and mental experience.

Ib-Adat, Anum Naseer

Masters Theses

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Note Of An Image-Game Maker, Yuanhui Li

Masters Theses

This notebook archives the process of cases I turn images into games, and my own evolution as an image-game creator along the way. A clarification: image games are not images made for games, but images as games. This is a diary, a scrapbook, a message record, an album, a specimen folder. Here, I attempt to analyze the experiences that make up my artistic body. To unfold why image games have become my intuition. Or, even if I never find the answer, to leave an anchor for the future me. Ideally, one of the four editions of this notebook will always …

Unnatural Nature: A Visual Artist’S Reflection On Myth, Medium, And Feminine Being, Rong Xu

Masters Theses

My artistic journey has been guided by a childhood fascination with mythology and how our ancestors interpreted the natural world. As my practice evolved toward digital media, I began questioning what "nature" truly means—is it an objective reality or a construct filtered through cultural lenses and personal experience?

The transition from traditional to digital tools—from physical brushes to Apple Pencil and Wacom stylus—removed much of the spontaneous dialogue with materials that once mirrored nature's own randomness. While I initially celebrated my ability to simulate traditional techniques digitally, I now recognize this transformation demands a fundamental reconsideration of how artists connect …

Embodied Archives, Emerging Futures, Xuân-Lam Nguyen

Masters Theses

Fifty years after the end of the U.S.–Vietnam War, this thesis reflects on the entangled relationship between the two nations, inspiring hope while challenging dominant representations of trauma and tragedy. Drawing from autobiography, family history, folk art traditions, colonial photographs, hierarchies within art history, archives of student activism, and key geopolitical events, the work explores the complex intersections of queer identity and glitchy historical narratives. Combining research-based inquiry with time- and labor-intensive processes, it reimagines historical materials to construct alternate possibilities for the future.

To Stain The Soul, Shaoqing Chen

Masters Theses

The process of art-making is a BDSM activity. Painting doesn’t start from the brain. It starts from the hands. Most of the time, painters move through muscle memory, not thought. So, who is in control? I believe there is a higher being—the God of Art. Not a person, not a legend, but something beyond exciting. It loves to see the artist sacrificed, suffering, twisted. It wants something beautiful and painful.

My art practice in the studio is like a BDSM moment in a dungeon. I am the submissive. The god is the one who gives orders. The more I suffer—both …

A Personal Manual Of Escapism, Qing Wen

Masters Theses

In this fast-paced, information-saturated era, avoidance has become a common mechanism of self-preservation. Confronted with global crises and structural instability, the current generation increasingly adopt a pessimistic stance toward the future: some retreat into virtual worlds, others find themselves unable to bear the weight of real-life responsibilities, and many turn to art as a private sanctuary. But is avoidance only a pejorative term?

It wasn’t until recently that I realized, nearly all of my creative work has stemmed from a place, or an action of escape. The imagined worlds I’ve built, the spaces I created to flee from reality—without knowing …

Where Motion Lingers..., Cheng-Lin Lee

Masters Theses

In the pursuit of seamlessness, modern technology has become oversimplified, reduced to simple taps and pushes of buttons. This standardized interaction feels distant and mechanical, offering services without inviting touch, movement, or emotion.

This thesis explores how technology can blend into everyday life in a gentle way. The designed objects will focus on integrating familiar movements that elicit moments of harmony within interactions with technology. Through design transformations, this project seeks to uncover how everyday movements, like lifting a handle and placing flowers, can transform our technological exchanges into something felt rather than simply performed.

The findings reveal that when …

Rooted In Embodied Making: A Notebook On Process, Vija Lietuvninkas

Masters Theses

This thesis takes the form of a wooden box containing an archive of fragments – scanned notebooks, sketches, photographs, emails, journal entries, and other materials – that trace a year of embodied, process-based inquiry. Rather than presenting a linear argument or a polished final product, the work reflects a nonlinear, exploratory methodology grounded in making, wandering, and self-reflection.

Born within the context of the 2025 Sustainability Design Lab, an interdisciplinary initiative at RISD examining the material culture of wood across design fields, this project documents the artist’s evolving engagement with green wood as both material and metaphor. Through practices such …

Pressing Into Absence, Linda Sok

Masters Theses

Pressing into Absence traces the materials, processes, and works I have engaged with between March 2023 and May 2025, positioning historical and contemporary narratives in dialogue with one another. This book interweaves colonial-era source materials (from 1864- 1928) - writings, etchings, and paintings of Cambodia produced by persons from the United States of America and France - with personal anecdotes from my travels to Cambodia in 2024. These accounts are layered alongside speculative reflections in the form of text, sketches, mind maps, and material explorations. These archival remnants and personal experiences are folded together and positioned as equally reliable sources. …

Smora: Breath As Memory, Pratikesh Pundkar

Masters Theses

Smora: Breath as Memory explores smell as a medium for memory, presence, and emotional communication in a world dominated by visual and audio stimuli. The project investigates olfactory interaction through multisensory design, proposing a tangible product system called Smora Cassette that captures, stores, and shares scent memories. Grounded in user research, expert interviews, and material prototyping, Smora speculates a future where smell reconnects us to the truth of lived experience, offering a poetic yet grounded alternative to AI-generated realities.

Graphic Gestures On The Digital Surface; In Defense Of The Observational, Soyoung Ro

Masters Theses

This thesis offers a subjective and process-based exploration of digital tools, challenging the dominant function-driven mindset that often defines digital design today. Rather than prioritizing speed, efficiency, or usability metrics, this work is a shift in focus toward experience, spatial awareness, and the subtle dynamics of interaction.

Rooted in acts of attention—looking inwards, looking outwards—this approach begins by setting aside assumptions about what tools are for, in order to ask how they shape our behaviors and ways of thinking. In doing so, it proposes a design methodology grounded in presence over productivity, process over execution, and agency over automation.

The …

Show Time!, Georgia Oldham

Masters Theses

Time is always ticking and never easy to hold on to. Luckily, twisting over sketchbooks and doodling in page margins, sequential artists are on a mission to capture it for everybody. They’re even going to tell you a story along the way. This thesis explores my relationship to sequential art as it relates to time, storytelling, accessibility, and the performing arts.

Textus Complexus, Vishakha Ruhela

Masters Theses

textus complexus investigates how language shapes thought by merging scientific rigour and poetic action to challenge reductive narratives. My inquiry stems from a fascination with complexity as an existential condition—one that resists homogenisation, preserves collective memory, and demands inclusive, multidimensional engagement. Hybridity, as a spectrum from complicated to complex, becomes a methodological tool to uncover latent connections that lead to cross-communication, and articulate transitional spaces through recursive processes. By systematising multiplicity via layering, modularisation, and indexing, my work foregrounds expression through form, where structural clarity emerges from cumulative gestures rather than simplification.

The projects in this thesis trace the roots …

No One Thing, Kate Brown

Masters Theses

Graphic design has mobility. It is oriented toward action, travel, and distribution.

My projects put me in touch with people and ideas, language, and visual form. They’re broad, conversational, and curatorial in spirit. They allow me to cut a path through the discipline of graphic design, and to branch opportunistically out to others, when I can—to art, architecture, fashion, writing. I expand my field of operations. Make it as big as you are. Make it 1:1. Take the part and run with it. Fold it up, send it away.

Considering The Ethics Of Conserving American Art: White Nationalism And The Evolving Meanings Of Nineteenth-Century Genre And Landscape Painting, Evan M. Crocker

LSU Master's Theses

This thesis analyzes the stylistic and conceptual qualities of American genre and landscape painting from the antebellum period and how these qualities acted in service to establishing white nationalism before the Civil War. The intricate and calculated system of typing in genre painting presented carefully crafted idealizations of quintessential Americans, defined by their whiteness and maleness. Landscape painters of the early- to mid-nineteenth century endowed their compositions with a sense of wondrous opportunity which justified and upheld westward expansion under Manifest Destiny. At the intersection of genre and landscape practices sits plantation paintings—specifically house portraits—in which the plantation serves as …

Enduring Words: Resistance Through Sculptural Libraries, Alex C. Jacobs

LSU Master's Theses

Enduring Words: Resistance Through Sculptural Libraries is a thesis exhibition that challenges book censorship by transforming reading into a public and defiant act. Through direct sculptural interventions, the exhibition confronts cultural erasure, questions who controls the literature we consume, and highlights the role of art in safeguarding contested knowledge. This thesis focuses on a current body of exhibited sculptural works that embody the tension between access and erasure. These installations engage with the viewer by using a lighthouse built of books and a speech-bubble-shaped library embedded with censored texts. They do not quietly mourn the suppression of knowledge; they confront …

Automatonophobia, Adrian Bruch

Staff Scholarship - Australia & Dubai

These artworks were created as a direct result of my teaching the ANI216 Animation Studio. In the process of devising ways to incorporate photographic imagery into an animation, I developed a multi-plane system where I could create layers in Adobe Photoshop and combine them with original cartoon characters in After Effects and then animate them.

These artworks for an exhibition at the Garden Gallery (Royal Botanic Gardens, Sydney) are imaginary stills inspired by the actual animation. All three were sold.

A House With No Walls Where Persimmons Grow In The Garden: Photography As A Collaborative Feminist Practice And Using Archives To Reframe The Present, Jada Wheeler

University Honors Theses

A House With No Walls is an investigation of the idea of chosen family, as it exists apart from the influence of any institution. It alludes to the home as a place that exists within space shared with the people we choose as family and within our own free bodies. This project investigates the collaborative potential of photography, and uses it as a tool in creating a feminist representation of family. All the photographs were made with close friends, in an unplanned and spontaneous manner, to document intimate moments of our everyday lives.

Where Persimmons Grow In The Garden is …

Misidentification In A Digital Age: The Ethical Implications And Challenges Of Ai Integration In Scientific Illustration, Bethanie Dian Clawson

Masters Theses

Scientific illustration is a crucial resource in scientific communication, providing visual educational assistance for fields such as science, medicine, and agriculture. This thesis explores the influence of artificial intelligence (AI) on scientific illustration and examines the strengths and weaknesses of AI-generated scientific illustration as compared to human-made illustration. Through the analysis of peer-reviewed sources, this study brings awareness to the common issues presented in AI-generated scientific images, explaining the risks associated with professional, research, and public settings.

To address these challenges, research is presented to explain tactics to mediate potential errors associated with AI-generated images, the importance of human intervention …

Yesterday, Today, And Forever: Preserving Traditional Hymns, Randi Martin

Masters Theses

Music plays a vital role in today’s church. Throughout history, Christian songwriters have written hymns that have been passed down through generations of believers. In recent years, contemporary Christian songs have replaced traditional hymns in many churches. While a variety of music styles can be effectively used in worship, the disappearance of the traditional hymn robs churchgoers of the theological depth and timeless truths that live within many of these old hymns. These beautiful, soul-stirring hymns could be forgotten if action isn’t taken to preserve them for future generations of worshipers.

This thesis examines ways to preserve the heritage of …

More Than 9 Lives: Improving Shelter Cat Intake And Adoption Rates, Arthur S. Loomis

Masters Theses

Municipal animal shelters across the United States struggle to properly care for the cats housed in their facilities due to overpopulation. The sheer volume of cats entering shelters greatly outpaces the rate in which they are adopted out, resulting in an immense resource strain that too often results in the euthanasia of millions of shelter cats across the country each year. The enormous influx of cats is largely due to abandonment or considerable populations of feral, stray, or community cats living on the streets. In addition, shelter cat adoptions occur at a much slower pace, with many cats spending months, …

Waffles And Spaghetti: The Effects Of Cognitive Processing Methods On Team Performance And Communication, Jonah Daniel Browning

Masters Theses

The goal of this thesis is to shed light on a practical method for resolving conflicts in team environments that stem from miscommunications brought on by differing cognitive processes. Our brains use different cognitive processing techniques to make sense of and explore the vast amount of information the world presents them on a daily, even hourly basis. Each person has their own thinking style which influences how teams collaborate and problem solve. However, miscommunication can often arise when individuals fail to recognize and adapt to the varying processing methods, which can lead to frustration and inefficiency.

This research seeks to …

Little Disciples: Providing At Home Christian Educational Resources To Parents For Their Children’S Spiritual Growth, Samantha Hatfield

Masters Theses

It has always been difficult to keep young people attending church after they reach the freedom of adulthood, but their absence continued to grow with each generation. It is hard to prove whether their decline in attendance is due to lack of spiritual formation in younger years or just the changing of the times is hard to prove, but it can be inferred that more training and honest conversations in earlier years would positively affect this statistic as well as the spiritual wellbeing of future generations. Since the most formative years of children based on brain development are between ages …

Bringing Light To The Knowledge Gap Regarding Menopause Symptoms And Hormone Therapy, Jayme Kendall

Masters Theses

Purpose: The purpose of this thesis is to raise awareness about the knowledge gap regarding many common menopause symptoms and the positive impact of hormone therapy (HT), a.k.a. hormone replacement therapy (HRT) and menopause hormone treatment (MHT).

Methods: An initial review of current literature is useful for identifying relevant professional resources of knowledge and understanding the problem. Further, analyses of The Menopause Society, the 2002 Women's Health Initiative (WHI) study, and Dr. Mary Claire Haver's work shed light on the problem and provide insights to help build a successful educational campaign. Additionally, visual analyses of "When to Try Hormone Therapy," …

All But Mud & Memories, Chase Lt Romero

LSU Master's Theses

All But Mud & Memories addresses the inevitability of erosion and land loss near my homeland of Algiers Point— locally known as The Point— through the perspective of locals and visitors, in addition to my own experience. Located near New Orleans across the Mississippi River, Algiers Point holds a community that shares a tender bond with the levee that protects their home and day-to-day interactions. Often in discussions of wetland events in Louisiana, the focus is on land and environmental losses rather than the surrounding culture. I provide a more community-centered narrative by expressing what’s to be lost if the …

7 Gateways In The Milky Way, Reina Alvarez

CGU MFA Theses

In a world saturated with digital distractions, 7 Gateways in the Milky Way offers an invitation to slow down, step inside a moment, and contemplate the unseen. This body of work reframes time and perception through a series of conceptual cosmic creations—immersive installations meant to be occupied, not just observed.

The series incorporates geometric abstraction, conceptual sculpture, and contemplative environments composed of textiles, wood, sand, sound, light, redefined found objects, and ram’s horns. Inspired by the mysticism of the number seven—often symbolizing completion or cycle—each piece acts as a portal, shifting the viewer’s sense of space and time.

These site-responsive …