This thesis examines my fears of death and dying. Through my studio art practice, which includes observational representation, ceremonial and ritualistic performance, and installation, I seek to confront my own difficulty in accepting death's emotional weight. My motivation stems from my attachment to my mother's mortality and her relationship with dying animals. In researching cultural customs relating to death, I was inspired to explore non-archival materials and ritualistic processes reflecting my understanding of our bodies' temporal nature. This includes swaddling, etching, using materials such as branches, animal bones, copper, shells, and pine needles, and encasing materials in wax. My points of interest are occurrences of death and decay. These interactions help me find acceptance and comfort during moments of uncertainty. Scale variations in my work are intentional and directly correlate my emotional response to my experiences with nature. From small, intimate works to larger, monumental ones, I explore the authority that size achieves when exaggerated and paired with images. These gestures of curiosity and compassion aim to emphasize my innate care and the ability to restore dignity surrounding the experience of loss and dying. Centered around the ubiquity of grieving and healing, my creative process and work products express the crucial value of accepting my own impermanence through emotional vulnerability. Creating this body of work helped me realize and appreciate alternative understandings and associations with death; and by exhibiting the work, I am inviting the viewer into my life and practice with the hope it creates a brief opportunity for them to reflect and reconsider their relationship with death.

Video games as a medium have always focused on having their players interact with their game worlds and narratives regardless of genre. However, a repeatedly debated concept is whether players are able to feel a sense of identification with their avatars. The majority of this debate revolves around studying works with a multiplayer focus, such as MMOs, where players can interact with one another. This paper seeks to explore if players can identify with their avatar in single-player role-playing games (RPG), as this genre focuses on the player's direct influence on the narrative through various mechanics that allow the player to craft an avatar's identity. These mechanics typically include character customization, dialogue choice, and narrative consequences, which permits the player to form a unique narrative with their avatar and thus characterize the avatar throughout their time playing a game. This paper will use Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and BioWare's Dragon Age: Origins as case studies on how this genre accomplishes player identification and how different games use their own methods to accomplish this. The ultimate goal is to explore how games as an interactive medium can allow players to become active participants in these games and shape their narratives.

This thesis reflects my research and studio practice into how memory is gathered, interpreted, and affects the present. I discuss my historical and contemporary artistic influences, my history, and my visual narratives. I construct layered drawings using charcoal and soft pastel to interpret how we understand our inherently flawed memory. Memory can be clear and easy to understand but simultaneously distorted and convoluted. When recalling a memory, I purposely keep my initial drawn gestures visible to show the pentimenti or shift in marks. The materials, processes, and subject matter in this body of work encourages viewers to navigate the drawn narratives and reflect on the elusive ways memories manifest.

Among the many problems that exist in the urban built environment today, uninviting pedestrian spaces is a prominent characteristic especially adjacent to inner-city shopping centres. Often, this is accompanied by a divorce of the building from the street, where the irony is that the street, which is a prominent public pedestrian space and connector of people, places and everyday lives, is often an underappreciated and unrealised pedestrian space. In the CBD of Claremont suburb, Cape Town, this is a reality and the resulting social ills such as dead zones, a lack of public surveillance, high crime rates, poor quality of space and lack of sense of place- all which can clearly be seen in this area. To realise the dual role that the street can play as both a public pedestrian space and a connector of people and place, professionals and role-players in the built environment should challenge the norms around street form, street-building interaction, people's perceptions that shaped the current day street and continue to influence its physical and perceived position within our cities and town. The literature component of this study seeks to unpack the qualities and functions of urban streets and their possible role as quality public space. The design component of this study seeks to explore and identify interventions at a local scale.

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This thesis is an exploration of the reciprocal relationship between my identity and my work as an artist. As someone who identifies as queer and from a young age felt unloved and unwelcome, my work provides space for validation and empowerment. I utilize elements of fantasy and symbolism to explore the ever-expanding possibilities of allegory and queer figuration. Through my usage of portraiture and personal symbolism as well as my reinterpretations of Christian religious motifs, Greek mythology, and Mannerist art, I transform existing narratives to depict a multitude of characters that my work allows me to embody. In opening myself up, I express and question my understanding of "love" as it applies to a sense of communion through art and the idea of utopia while also making the necessary room for empathy and queer visibility. To this end, I reference my life experiences, thoughts, feelings, and artistic process in order to invite an intimate understanding of myself and my work.

In this project, I created a framework for exploring problems with representations of marginalized characters in video games called "critical modding." The main goal of this project was to provide a method for addressing issues with portrayals of queer characters in video games through modification of a game's narrative and gameplay systems. I also created a video game prototype called Life in the Megapocalypse as a digital tool for engaging in critical modding. In addition, I created classroom assignments based on the game prototype aimed at helping people learn more about problems with portrayals of queer characters in games through critical modding that can be found in Appendix B. I created the critical modding framework based on established research on education, queer representation, and narrative design related to video games. The video game prototype is built in a text-based interactive fiction scripting engine called Inky and is stored in a web-based version on my website; I also provided selected source code from the game in Appendix C of this project. The game focuses on representations of queer characters in a post-apocalyptic world and asks the player to make choices by offering the characters guidance, as well as talking with them to learn more about them. This project is valuable in that it provides a research-based framework for exploring problems with portrayals of queer characters in video games through modification, an idea that has not been explored in established video game research. It also provides a tool for doing so in the form of the video game prototype, offering a unique approach that blends traditional academic research with digital design.

I create experimental films and installations that challenge the belief system I inherited from well-intended people who believed they furnished me with the "right" answers, behaviors, and expectations for a good and proper life. Applying the theory of cognitive dissonance as a philosophical framework to this formative and enforced messaging helps me appreciate why it is so difficult to accept new information incongruent with one's previously held beliefs. Through parallel efforts of self-reflection, research, and creative practice, I have begun to reexamine my upbringing and the ensuing insecurities, contradictions, and feelings of hypocrisy they engendered. My work aspires to transform my fears, anxieties, and mistakes into meaningful digital and tangible visual expressions; informed by and in response to, reflective work by contemporary artists and my personal reflexive experiences with relationships, death, and grief. Fueled by the practice of forgiveness, both of myself and others, I believe the creative process is helping me become a more compassionate person who is willing to reconsider, release, and accept my past and welcome new internal and external perspectives. Likewise, I hope presenting my artwork allows viewers to consider my struggle; and whether, and why, we may have common or divergent life experiences and perspectives.