What drew you into combining art with medicine, and how has this first inspired your artwork?

I’d say a bit of chances and choices! In my last semester of college, I took a class on human development and mindfulness, which was a quite last-minute decision. Since it was one of the last classes I took in undergrad I wanted to just have a bit of fun with it. For most of the self-reflection assignments, instead of using words, I created visuals to represent my journey with mindfulness, and that sparked the idea to create a platform where I combined visual art with mindfulness reflections, which eventually morphed into my mental health x graphic design account @innermagicart, and the design process eventually led me to think about neuroaesthetics and the cognitive process behind multisensory perception and mental health. There was another instance that I often go back to when thinking about “art” (I don’t really like to use the word art when talking about its overlap with medicine and health; I will circle back to this later) and the experience of our bodies, which of course encompasses health but also extend to our general psychosomatic conditions like pain, joy, and excitement. A few years ago I stumbled upon an immersive exhibition in Chelsea called The Life of a Neuron. It was one of those experiences that stirred something deep within me. I remember sitting on the floor, in front of these enormous 360 degree projections of neurons firing, signaling, and connecting. It was as if, in that moment, I was both the observer and the observed, part of the same neural network that I was observing, being simultaneously outside and within, both human and something beyond human. I must confess, I teared up a little during that exhibition, but it was not sadness, in fact it was the opposite, it was the elation that I felt deep in my bones, the kind that makes you shake with excitement and a little nerves for all the things that you want to explore but don’t know what to expect yet.

I started to work on immersive art pieces after returning from a trip to New York City, hoping to reflect on and learn about the intersection of science and the arts / humans’ aesthetic experiences overall really. The vision behind one of the first immersive pieces I made, “The Breathing Body The Breathing Mind”, was to create a communal meditative space where we can just let our minds wander, dive into the unexpected, and embrace our sensorial experience as we move between the bodily space we inhabit physically and the mind space, where the visuals can bring us into a deeper state of reflections, thoughts, and sensations. I timed my breathing pattern and mapped that cadence to create a constantly contracting and expanding space of perpetual motion and symmetrical patterns and bursts of colors. Creative practices like this later became an articulated passion of mine and also a principle for my research in health – the intersection of the arts and sciences not as end products, like a piece of painting or a piece of equipment, but how art and science serve as ways of seeing, recognizing and inquiring (circling back to why I don’t want to overuse the word art, but be very intentional about conceptualizing it as a way of seeing and recognizing), as ways in which we explore our relations with beauty, with the world, ways for us to think about how we see the world and even ourselves, and why that matters.