What does your imagination look like? Can tapping into our imagination improve our wellbeing? The Imagination Studio Project is a study that aims to understand how engaging in creative arts activities can improve mental health and wellbeing in undergraduate students. The 6-week program, which took place in Fall Semester 2023 at the University of Minnesota, was designed to help students tap into their own imagination through a series of art projects that explored their inner and outer worlds. The curriculum was shaped by professional artists’ vision: Yuko Taniguchi (poet), Peng Wu (visual artist), Sam St. John (mixed media artist), Seangarrison (abstract painter), and Miri Villiard (visual and mural artist). The exhibition celebrates the inspirational work created by twenty-eight brave and curious students who joined the Imagination Studio program to help the researchers on this journey.
The Imagination Studio Exhibition is currently on display on the third and seventh floors of the University of Minnesota Health Sciences Education Center (HSEC). The artwork will be on display through the summer of 2024. View the virtual gallery here!
This project is funded by the President's Initiative on Student Mental Health Seed Grant. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the arts and cultural heritage fund.
Imagination Studio
It’s my imagination again. Her body, in the shape of a full moon, is covered with blue fur. She only has one eye, transparent like a window, and round blue teeth. She sits by my feet and finds things to chew because everything is chewable, like my homework, a biology paper, due tomorrow.
Right now, she is chewing a page filled with delicious-sounding words: mitochondria, microtubules, lysosomes. Why name each cell as if it is a child? What inspired the people from the past to look within? Why make the invisible, visible? Did they wonder about big things like what lies beyond the sky, like the way we wonder what lies beyond galaxies? Does anyone worry about the sun not showing up one day after 4.6 billion years of burning? Is the earth more broken now than it ever used to be? Will the people from the future wonder why we didn’t imagine the consequences of creating things that cannot be digested by the earth?
The more she chews, the bluer my paper becomes, and the paper is still due tomorrow. Sit, stay, stop imagining. I command my imagination. She looks up, pieces of paper hanging out of her mouth. I see stories circulating inside her eye. I sigh out.
It’s exhausting to house my imagination. But I am her studio in which her blue body is free to roll, chew, play, laugh and cry out loud, out of control, out of breath.
Imagine, her eye closing, never looking back. No one can imagine such darkness, the absence of a window to another world, another time, space where hope we haven’t yet seen awaits.
– Yuko Taniguchi
Credits: Peng Wu and Charlie Cullen