Creative Writing Commons^™

New Old Things, Emily Middleton

Intertidal

No abstract provided.

Big Eyes, Diana Boboc

Intertidal

No abstract provided.

Post-Credit Scene, Kaylin Alder

Intertidal

No abstract provided.

Tùn-Scene And A-Futurism: Biomythography, Opacity, And Posthuman Imagination, Minglu Du

Masters Theses

Grounded in the author’s position as a Chinese feminist, this thesis examines how East Asian women, as well as East Asian-coded femininity more broadly, are objectified and othered within futurist visual culture in the age of artificial intelligence. Through an engagement with ornamentalism, techno-Orientalism, and posthumanism1 , it argues that the persistent figure of the feminized humanoid cyborg continues to reproduce colonial and patriarchal structures of desire, rendering marginalized bodies as fetishized and violable surfaces. In response, the thesis develops Tùn-Scene, a biomythographic artistic framework and the first experiment in what the author provisionally names A-Futurism. Drawing on Donna Haraway’s …

Recombobulation- Taking The Bad With The Good, Gregory T. Kmieciak

Masters Theses

Recombobulation, a play on the word discombobulated (completely disoriented and utterly confused), is intended as a joke.  In the lore of the Milwaukee airport, the Recombobulation Area is located between the TSA check point and the boarding area, or likewise right after you land and before you are heading out of the airport. It's an area to regroup, get your bearings, or if you're anything like me, have a beer.

I've chosen this made-up word as a thesis title, both for its informal tone and to pay homage to my home town. It offers an air of lightness to otherwise …

Auxiliary Damage, Aiyi Cheng

Masters Theses

AuxiliarY DamagE asks what happens to pain when it is moved outside the body and given material form. Pain is not treated here as an image to be represented, but as something processed through repetition, pressure, exposure, and care. It is handled. Washed. Arranged. Pulled out. Swallowed back in.

Hair became the material that allowed this question to stay unstable. While attached to the body, it is intimate and ordinary. Once detached, it becomes residue, evidence, discomfort, value, and loss. In the studio, I washed collected hair, untangled it, threaded it through metal, placed it near flame, held it in …

1, 2, 2, 1, 1, 2, 1, 2, 2, 1, 2, 2, 1, 1, ..., Annemarie Torresen

Masters Theses

1

I invite you to see it and feel it and sit in it and breathe it in and

hold it in your lap. Art isn’t too scary, and neither is math.

2

bouncing between bounds of a binary

bippity boppity! let’s break brains and bread

balance or belly flop, what’s mine is yours:

bumptious and bumbling and barely able

i offer it broken and let you like it that way

Until The Ground Breaks, Annie Hu

Masters Theses

Until the Ground Breaks explores the complex relationship between personal memory, embodied experience, and internalized "archival logic." By examining long-term cross-cultural diasporic experiences and the shifting dynamics of family narratives—including the sensory experiences and fading memory of a grandmother, a father's correspondence that acts as a textual record of emotional logic, and the continuous revision of family history—this thesis dissects the psychological tremors that occur when the illusion of a singular, stable memory archive collapses. This research rejects the view of memory as a static container of truth, revealing it instead as a dynamic, unstable, and constantly rewritten living system. …

Care Ecologies Between Knots, Eliza R. Marris

Masters Theses

Discarded fibers like raw wool behave the way harm reduction does. Harm reduction resists stigma and works to move beyond assumptions and oversimplifications of substance use and addiction. Wool is irregular, complicated, and emotionally charged. It resists compression and maintains its own being even when pulled apart. Working with raw wool is in relationship with complexity, as is harm reduction.

At its core, harm reduction is grounded in thoughtfulness and empathy towards people, their lived experience, and its nuances. It is a witness to lives, memories, and imprints, acknowledging the entangled realities of addiction. Our detachment from fiber remainders, materials …

Fallen Leaves:The Unseen, Forgotten, Presences That Live In Us, Juhee Cho

Masters Theses

The fallen leaf is a material figure of the unseen, forgotten moments that have made us and holds us still while remaining outside our sight. In urban environments, fallen leaves are managed as seasonal waste, collected and quickly separated from everyday encounter. Yet within ecological systems, they continue to participate in cycles of regeneration, becoming the soil that sustains new life. This quiet continuation is unavailable to the eye, yet known by the body. As a proof of this, the leaf’s transformation reveals itself not to the mind, but to the hand. The curling fiber wears out, the deepening brown, …

Draw To Breathe, Ranran Ma

Masters Theses

This thesis explores visual expression in drawing as an intuitive mode of thinking suited to everyday life—a form of expression that runs parallel to language and surpasses it.

The project begins with a daily Post-it note drawing practice. These drawings often emerge before conscious understanding, subsequently accompanied by brief text, allowing image and word to resonate through emotion and intuition. Through the use of small-scale, portable, low-pressure materials, and with immediacy and intuitive freedom as the foundation of making, a visual language system grounded in the self develops. Through this sustained practice, I developed an instruction-based card system titled Draw …

چھپن چھپائی (Chupan Chupai), Muhammad Talha Mr

Masters Theses

Baji, how do you breathe in a burqa? Doesn’t it suffocate you? Don't ask too many questions, walk straight, and don’t let go of my hand. Men were standing in the street, and she was trying to avoid them, walking as fast as she could, almost dragging me. I saw a big wedding tent. It was a multi-colored, red, yellow, blue, and green pattern. I asked baji, Is that where we are going? She nodded in affirmation. The tent was beautiful. I saw kids peeking inside the tent, and it reminded me of a time when I was doing the …

Seeking Ground, Shrishti Chatterjee

Masters Theses

Design increasingly sits within modern systems that reduce the world to narrow, instrumental categories. A tree is paper, the sky is a clock, an ant is a pest. And a graphic designer is a visual marketer optimising for reach and engagement. This leaves the designer without a sense of their place in the world.

Seeking Ground asks how we might return to a more rooted practice. Physically, the ground is the solid surface on which all other things rest. Conceptually, it is the foundational premise from which knowledge is derived. To be grounded is to be connected to real-world implications …

Where Each Step Lands: Reconnecting And Reparenting Through Visual Narrative, Skye Wang

Masters Theses

This research begins with lived experiences of dissociation and a persistent sense of disconnection between body and consciousness. It explores the potential of visual narrative as an embodied practice. Through daily walking and sketching, bodily sensations are translated into visual language through a synesthetic process, forming the foundation for a picture book as the central outcome of this project.

The picture book adopts the perspective of a jumping spider positioned beneath a five-year-old girl’s shoe, creating a shifting, downward-facing viewpoint. The spider functions as a viewing position, while the girl represents the inner child. The narrative is constructed around the …

An Anxious Artist's Guide To Magic, Mot Tuman

Masters Theses

Illustration’s essence is using some type of media to tell a story. This could be anything from sculpture, watercolor, even just text alone. Beyond its medium, I have been thinking for a while of illustration and storytelling as a type of illusory magic. Magic, according to the Oxford language dictionary as being "The power of using supernatural or other unseen forces to apparently influence events or human behaviour." It gives us the power to reach inside the mind and heart of a person and change their emotional and mental state. It's the ability to create a world and have others …

If The Sun Were As Big As My Heart, What Would Be The Distance Between The Sun And The Earth? Or How To Domesticate The Sun, Catalina Martinez, Catalina Martinez Rojas

Masters Theses

If the Sun were as big as my heart, what would be the distance between the Sun and the Earth? Or how to domesticate the Sun is a multidisciplinary installation project that explores how emotional, spiritual, and perceptual experiences can be translated into material form. Beginning from a speculative mathematical proposition that reduces the scale of the Sun to the size of the artist’s heart, the project investigates distance not only as a physical condition, but also as an emotional and domestic one.

Drawing from Colombian vallenato traditions, everyday observations of sunlight, and references ranging from Agnes Martin and Wayne …

Studio One Volume 50, Studio1 Literary Club

Studio One

No abstract provided.

A Puff's Exploration Of Wayne Hopkins, Ethan G. Mullen, Leon Wiebers

Honors Thesis

This thesis is a synthesis of modalities I have studied during the course of my Theatre Arts degree, applied to the realization of the principal character, Wayne Hopkins in the award-winning play Puffs (Or: Seven Increasingly Eventful Years at a Certain School of Magic and Magic) a LMU Theatre Arts Department production. This work is divided into three major sections. First, I reflect on how I applied acting tools I have studied at LMU to the development of my character and performance. These include script analysis, story structure analysis, breath work, and Viewpoints training. Second, I share media displaying my …

Caladrius: Creating A Playable Game Via A Multimedia Experience, Isabelle Morgan Brookshire

Whittier Scholars Program

Caladrius: Creating a Playable Game via a Multimedia Experience hones in on making an experience through different forms of media to represent a game. If this project was fully funded and done, it would be a video game on Steam with an art exhibition, small poetry book, and novel accompanied with it. It would even have a show, a soundtrack, and merch. But at this level, it was to make an experience for my audience that they could experience whether or not they enjoyed video games as a concept. I wanted them to enjoy 'playing' within a physical exhibition and …

Illustrated Children's Book: "The Adventures Of Mr. C", Anne-Marie Wadsworth, Joanne Whitcombe

Honors Capstones

"The Adventures of Mr. C" is a children's book written by Anne-Marie Wadsworth and her grandmother, Joanne Whitcombe. It was illustrated by Anne-Marie Wadsworth, 2026 NIU graduate, as her honor's capstone project. The book was presented at NIU's 2026 Visual Communication Senior Show on April 30th. It is a christian-inspired true story about an abandoned bird (Mr .C) that becomes part of Joanne's family. Mr C. flies away from his home and is lost for many months, until Joanne experiences a timely, unexpected miracle that only God and his angels can take credit for.

The Bridge, Bridgewater State University

the bridge

No abstract provided.

Memory Organs, Coco Ma

Theses and Dissertations

Working across architectural sculpture, sonic works, and monoprints, this thesis explores the body as a site where memory, materiality, and cultural history converge. Drawing from muscle memory, Chinese architectural thresholds, and female narratives, it traces a body that is simultaneously physical and psychological, personal and collective, constant yet always shifting.

Lovepilled, Zhiliang Zhao

Theses and Dissertations

"Lovepilled" is a collection of essays and stories about love, the longing for it, and where it takes place.

Internalizing Diasporic Peoples: How Do We Keep Native Hawaiians Connected?, Kallie P. Kaaihue-Paopao

Whittier Scholars Program

In the attempt to better understand the grounds for the generation culture disconnect of identity in Native Hawaiians, I study the diaspora of my people. Diaspora is the dispersion of people from their native lands. I find interest in this aspect of my people because the most common studies blame our dispersion on socioeconomic status and as a Native Hawaiian that wishes to do more for her people, I want to express that while it plays a part that there is a disconnection between the social actions and reactions of Hawaiʻi’s people. Common questions that I find unanswered are, why …

Alternative, Ashlynn M. Stroud

Graduate Theses and Dissertations (2019 - present)

A series of illustrations, sculptures and comic book issues designed to introduce a series of stories and characters that represent the history and members of a fictional mythology depicting the cultural social group often referred to as the “alternative” community. Alternative takes place in a world that combines high fantasy and science fiction with elements of pop culture and music. This world uses iconography of the various genres of the alternative subculture and music, metal, post-punk, and the evolving scene of the underground with varying visuals from both gothic and industrial time periods. Viewers are encouraged to read and follow …

Belmont Literary Journal Launch Event, Jason J. Riley Iv, Audrey Blake, Darwin Canales, Claire Carrillo, Abigail Coe, James Derryberry, Istbra Elmi, Bevan Johnson, Ava Lange, Keira Naab, Bailey Passarelli, Ava Rowland, Leticia Schueth, Samuel Shepley, Margaret Simpkins, Owen Tarro

SPARK Symposium Presentations

Join the Belmont Literary Journal in celebrating the launch of their online publication! This presentation will include insights from the journal’s staff, selected readings from the poetry, fiction, and creative non-fiction categories, refreshments, and time to connect with Belmont’s diverse creative community.

Ink (2026)

Rabble, 2014-

The student-run features magazine covering the fashion, art, music and culture worlds at VCU and in Richmond. Published annually in print and updated regularly online.

Back Cover, Michaela Velleno, Erin Robinson, Zoé Shaikh

.RAW Journal of Art and Design

No abstract provided.

Credits, Michaela Velleno, Erin Robinson, Zoé Shaikh

.RAW Journal of Art and Design

No abstract provided.

Artist Index, Sam Arrigoni

.RAW Journal of Art and Design

No abstract provided.