Digital Collections Willamette University
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Adelina Ruvalcaba 2025
No full text"I Am de Mis Antepasadas" is a dedication to the labor of love. I use my art as a way of honoring my ancestors’ perseverance, drawing influences from the personalities, sacrifices, and the strengths of our family that continue to shape me into the adult I am today. This is my rendition of recontextualizing identity as an artist born into two beautiful Latin American cultures—both unique in their own right—alongside being born and raised in the United States of America. Creating ceramic fossils imprinted with the ingredients of my cuisine allows me to commemorate my ancestry while simultaneously passing down heirlooms for my descendants. I create for the pasado, the present, y el futuro
Felix Hastings 2025
Full text linkLambie: The Nostalgia Series is a series of four blind box figure designs, inspired by themes of nostalgia and childhood memories. This series focuses on my original character Lambie, a plush sheep who serves as both a mascot and persona for myself.
My thesis project explores themes of nostalgia, memories, and vulnerability through a series of blind box toys designed to feel like fragments of a childhood scrapbook. I wanted to capture small but meaningful moments, both happy and bittersweet. These memories hold both comfort and a sense of fragility, which I aimed to reflect in my designs. My project also highlights how toys can be more than just objects—they are a representation of memories, comfort, and belonging.
I designed 4 unique figures, including turnaround sheets, sculpted and painted prototypes, and illustrated insert cards. Each figure was inspired by my own childhood memories. Playhouse was inspired by my memories playing in my backyard, as well as the bittersweet feeling of outgrowing your childhood. Homework was inspired by the helplessness that comes along with being a child, and the stressful memories I have of doing math homework that often left me thinking I was dumb. Play Pretend was inspired by childhood imagination and the many hours I spent daydreaming and playing pretend as a child, often with my little sister following along after me. Lastly, Cozy Day was inspired by the safe and comforting memories I have of spending days at home during weekends, vacations, and snow days, just playing games and watching movies with my sister.
The turnaround sheets of each figure feature information that would be important in a manufacturing scenario, such as sculpt notes, painted details, and color palettes. Creating sculpted and painted prototypes was an important aspect of this project for me, as a multi-media artist, and these were sculpted in a mix of polymer and epoxy clay and then painted with acrylics. Often, blind box figures include insert cards of each design in the series, so I created watercolor illustrations for each of these, as well as wrote flavor text to introduce more context and create a better sense of worldbuilding in the project
Sarah Huttner 2025
No full textRooted in Wonder: Awe in Nature’s Connections is an artistic exploration of the vast interconnectedness of trees in the natural world. It is a body of work that reflects my own wonderment of the complexities that lie beneath our feet and above our heads. It is also an act of gratitude (appreciation) towards the trees themselves to better understand and help preserve their environment so that all will prosper. Without bringing the actual forest into the city, or into a gallery, I engage the viewers’ senses and evoke a memory or feeling, perhaps an instance of wonderment. I encourage the viewer to move past their initial feelings and into action. Whether simply hiking though a green space, or taking on the daunting threat of deforestation, I encourage viewers to change their focus toward the natural. Through this body of work, I bring myself and others closer to nature in an effort to instill the need for conservation and better land management so that future generations can share in this experience
Georgia Rector 2025
Full text link“In 1970, two childhood friends with a shared passion met a misfit farmgirl with a knack for guitar while on a trip to Montpellier. What started as a self-titled collection of the pair’s musical tinkering was about to be, well, a thing-- a spacey, rocky, multilingual, God-knows-what sounding thing. A lucky break secured the trio a deal with Disques Vogue, sending them on a years-long enterprise as the cultish weird girls of the French music scene.”
-Rock & Folk Magazine, 1976
from the Lavender Valley Archive: lavendervalley.neocities.org
Lavender Valley was a band of three young women that started humbly in the Pacific Northwest, achieved cult status in mainland Europe in the mid-70s, and was eventually forgotten except for a single rudimentary website founded in 1998. Though Frances, Beth, and Corinne are not actually real, my goal is to make Lavender Valley feel as real as I can. This type of storytelling is called unfiction, or immersive fictional stories told through nonfictional means. By combining unfiction with colorful vintage visuals, the Internet, and inspirations from my favorite real bands, I’m able to create a personally fulfilling extended project that necessitates I take on multiple artistic roles and goes far beyond thesis.
The thesis project is made up of Lavender Valley’s 6 albums, for a total of 11 fully illustrated images. Visual codes of the design, photography, and type of the 1970s insert the band directly into reality, making the audience question if what they’re seeing is authentic. The album covers live on the Lavender Valley Archive website, the heart of the project overall. The album artwork has also been fabricated into LP slipcases and installed among real vintage albums for the audience to search for as if they were actually shopping for records. All of these methods of delivering this unfiction narrative serve to explore just how real I can make this band feel
Matt Seavers
No full textMy thesis centers on a series of oil paintings that explore how memory distorts and reshapes itself over time. Drawing from my own childhood in a working-class neighborhood—alleyways, backyards, overgrown lots, and half-forgotten pile-ons—I use paint to investigate how ordinary places become charged with emotion, myth, and personal significance.
These works are not literal depictions of past events, but emotional reconstructions. I often start with a specific fragment—a cracked sidewalk, a chain-link fence, the tangle of limbs during a backyard brawl—and let the painting evolve from there. Figures dissolve into landscape, spaces flatten or twist, and forms repeat or vanish entirely. I lean into ambiguity, trusting the process to mirror the uncertainty of memory itself.
The visual language borrows from artists like Joan Brown and William Kentridge, who navigate the tension between personal narrative and formal experimentation. Carl Jung’s writing on the unconscious helped me think about memory not just as a personal archive, but as something archetypal—shaped by symbols, emotions, and repetition.
Alongside the paintings, I created a small zine titled The Possum Story: A Family Classic, which retells one childhood memory through multiple versions, highlighting how narrative shifts depending on time and perspective. While the zine grounds the project in language, it’s the paintings that carry the weight of memory—fragmented, emotional, and open-ended.
Together, these works ask what happens when we stop chasing the truth of the past and instead engage with how it continues to echo. I’m not painting what happened—I’m painting how it felt, how it changed, and how it continues to resurface, distorted but still alive
Katherine Meighen 2025
No full textMy project, titled “Folke the Kyrkogrim”, is a children's picture book about a guard dog named Folke, who through his own death, becomes the legendary folk character; the kyrkogrim. The book is written in a memoir style, telling the story of Folke’s life and death from his own perspective. I felt this was important in order to make the story more intimate, like you are sitting down to listen to an old man tell his tales. The intimate nature of the book aims to provide a bit of comfort and aid in minimizing children's fears of the unknown; helping to answer the age-old question, “What happens when we die?
Soren Spina 2025
No full textFor this project I am mostly working digitally to create character designs, backgrounds/environments, and assets, as well as write a 12 minute pilot episode and season outline. The physical style of the piece will combine a more cartoonish style for characters and objects, mixing them with a looser style for backgrounds and environments.
Some of my biggest inspirations for Nowhere Special are series like Over the Garden Wall, Yellowjackets and Welcome to Night Vale. I really enjoy the way that a lot of these stories seem to take place somewhere outside of time. The way that the characters within these worlds exist in such a strange and removed place is so intriguing to me. I also really enjoy these stories' balance of comedy and seriousness, as someone who likes to be a bit silly within my work. I really appreciate when a piece of media can find a good balance between fun and plot.
My hope for my thesis after graduation is to pitch it to a studio like adult swim or channel Frederator, but since I am aware that getting a series picked up (especially with how streaming treats animation right now) is very challenging, I could also see myself creating my series independently and then releasing it onto a site like youtube for people to be able to enjoy
Sam MacInnis 2025
No full textWhere Hyacinths Bloom is an abridged version of a longer film I intend to continue to work on over the summer. In its current form, it is a 2 minute 2D animated short film that explores themes of grief in a dark fantasy setting. In it, we follow Val, a maladjusted young woman who is visibly grieving the recent death of her best friend, Blue. As she goes through the motions of her day, she discovers a book of necromantic spells that has the potential to bring him back to life.
With depictions of cartoon blood and heavier subject matter, the film is not extraordinarily graphic but not suitable for younger audiences, and is geared towards fellow fans of dark fantasy in the 18-25 range.
WHB takes stylistic inspiration from the Hellboy comics and narrative inspiration from Killed The Cat Production’s short film Fuelled, Celeste Ng’s novel Everything I Never Told You, and Finji’s game Night In The Woods. The layouts feature heavy, graphic shading inspired by a comic style, more specifically the work of Mike Mignola.
Val’s character brings to light the numbness a lot of people experience during periods of grief between outbursts of overwhelming emotion. While her characterization has a life of its own, the way she handles grief is largely inspired by myself and the experience I had that inspired this project to begin with
Ro Hebert 2025
No full textImagine yourself here is a collection of objects exploring ideas of queerness in rural america. I assert that capitalism charges a premium for the culture people living in the margins bring to urban areas. By moving ourselves out into rural spaces we are able to restructure community and create land sovereignty, food security, and a close connection to our natural world. These objects look at what we would build in our new world
Lena Gonzales 2025
Full text linkThe Silly Billy Sticker Sheets are five pages starring my original characters, Silly Billys, engaging in various scenes and activities. Each page has a theme that the stickers correspond to, such as Food, Ocean, Big City, Day in the Park, and Fashion Week. These sticker sheets act as a lighthearted satire of everyday life with a dash of odd cartoonish humor. This product is for entertainment purposes and acts in tandem with a wider pitch for a future merchandise brand starring the same characters. My main objective with this project is to bring joy and laughter to others when they view this work. The world has become a very serious and scary place, so I want my work to make people feel better and be a reminder to have fun and be silly every once in a while. The Silly Billys will be drawn in various ways and sizes (multiple heads/feet, arms/no arms, etc). This diversity of their forms is meant to replicate real people and the diverse communities we live in. These sticker sheets and their themes reflect our ordinary world and activities through a nonsensical lens while promoting living life to the fullest, even through the stupidest of means. Although its main purpose is to entertain, it is also a weird love letter to life and the things in it that give the world vibrancy and joy