Mot Tuman’s MFA thesis in Illustration is a reflective companion text to the graphic novel An Artist at the End of the World. It explores why the author tells stories and how illustration can work as a kind of “magic” for people living with anxiety. The thesis opens with the author’s own history. Anxiety and creative block led to a recurring dream of a windowless room with endless walls, which made her realize how much avoidance was holding her back. She then traces her search for “magic” in art. As a teenager she believed it lay in technical craft and the flow state, a concept from Csikszentmihalyi. Over time she came to see story, intention and emotional impact as just as important. Theoretically, she draws on Aristotle’s catharsis, Tolkien’s idea of fairy stories, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s claim that fantasy speaks to the unconscious through symbol and archetype. She links this to Image Rehearsal Therapy, in which people rewrite recurring nightmares with positive endings. Humor, inspired by Taika Waititi, is meant to make difficult themes easier to approach. The graphic novel follows Ash, an anxious art student whose dreams turn apocalyptic after an attempted attack. Archetypal figures represent her psyche: the Business Man (fear of the future), Harpy (her childhood self and fear of the past) and a “text monster” made of anxious words. Ash eventually regains control by rewriting her dreams through drawing.
Evaluation Master’s Thesis
It doesn’t seem to be a master’s thesis that has the same rules as ours do. They use “I” and “me” the whole time, it revolves only around their work, and their thoughts on it. The design is outstanding, with very pretty artworks throughout it. The idea of depicting anxiety as a figure made of text is convincing. The author reflects on the ethical side of this decision, since the monster is based on a real male attacker. The idea of “illustration as magic” and the combination of anxiety research, fantasy theory and comics are original. Topic, practical work and argument clearly grow out of the author’s own experience. The structure follows a personal narrative logic rather than a scientific one. There is no table of contents, no research question and no methods chapter. The sequence of chapters is easy to follow, but the link between theory and practical work is often established only in retrospect. The text is lively, authentic and easy to read. For an academic audience, it lacks precision, for example in separating the perspective of a person affected from expert knowledge. The tone is at times very personal, which weakens the scholarly character. The reference list has 17 entries, including primary sources such as Tolkien, Le Guin and Aristotle, but also dictionary entries, YouTube videos. Current academic literature on anxiety disorders, nightmares or comics studies is largely absent.
Evaluation Werkstück
I could not find the finished work, even after contacting the artist, to no avail. I could only find a few pages posted here: https://publications.risd.edu/grad-show-2026/mot-tuman and https://www.mottuman.com/character-design.
From what I could gather, the finished work is a comic about Ashley, an perpetually anxious college student. While many fantasize about the wondrous powers that come from the ability to lucid dream, Ash has learned first hand that lucid dreaming doesn’t stop the worries of the day from following you into the night. After a traumatic event causes Ash to lose all ability to control her conscious dreams, she begins to have a series of fantastical dreams about faceless attackers and the end of the world. This graphic novel follows Ash’s journey as she struggles with her waking dream to be an animator, and her night-time dream to stop the end of the world.
There is no explicit research question. The connection is nevertheless established through the characters. The archetypes (Business Man, Harpy) and the plot structure put Le Guin’s thesis on symbols into practice.
As an artistic position, the work is strong. As a scholarly companion text by CMSI standards, it is rather weak, because methodology, evaluation and systematic documentation are missing. With a finished practical work and user feedback it would be much more convincing.
Benefits for your own thesis
To be honest…None. It is very pretty and I could look into some of the archetypes, but other than that it doesn’t have any connection to my thesis. Reason for that, is that I was barely ably to find a thesis from another uni with a Werkstück.
Conclusion
Overall, the thesis is an artistically strong and very personal thesis, but it only partly meets the requirements of a scientific thesis by our standards. Its strengths are the outstanding design, the original idea of depicting anxiety as a figure made of text, and the author’s honest, reflective voice. Its weaknesses are the missing research question and methodology, the narrow and partly informal literature base, and the lack of evaluation. The practical work is also not fully accessible, which makes it hard to judge whether theory and practice really come together. I would rate it high for design quality and independence, but lower for structure, literature and documentation. With a finished work, user feedback and a clearer academic framework, it could be a much stronger thesis. I would give it, all things considering, a 4.
Master’s Thesis:
https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2619&context=masterstheses
