Abeer Ahmed
Intersectional Identity
2024
Collage on paper, 26" x 20"

Background
Throughout my medical training, I have come to notice an invisible line often drawn between science and the humanities. Science is held up as objective and authoritative, while the humanities are quietly set aside – treated as decorative – despite their power to cultivate empathy and emotional insight. This piece pushes against that divide, asking what becomes possible when artistic practice is allowed to sit alongside medical education. Through collage, I explore how creativity and scientific rigor can inform one another, shaping not only how we learn medicine, but who we become while learning it.

Methods
This collage was created using fragments from my scientific thesis manuscript, medical textbook imagery, my past artworks, and lastly, contemporary art magazine clippings. The lower portion contains scientific text and anatomical imagery, while the upper portion incorporates expressive, abstract, and personal visual elements. Between these two areas is a transition zone where materials intermingle rather than remaining separate. As the artist, my figure is placed centrally within this space, representing my lived experience of moving between scientific training and creative practice.

Link to Identity
This work engages directly with the theme of identity by portraying my evolving self as a medical student, researcher, and artist – not as fragmented roles, but instead as interdependent facets of a whole. The overlapping collage materials symbolize how scientific rigor and creative expression bleed into one another, informing how the artist understands themselves as both a clinician and a person. By refusing a binary between art and science, this piece asserts that healthcare identity is enriched through integration. It invites viewers to reflect on their own identities within medicine and consider how imagination, emotion, and narrative are essential to learning, healing, and human connection.

Background/Purpose

Professional identity formation in medicine occurs within institutions shaped by long-standing traditions that have historically excluded or marginalized many identities. While medicine presents itself as universal and objective, learners often carry personal, cultural, and familial experiences that profoundly influence their wellbeing, motivation, and sense of belonging. Arts-based inquiry provides a means to explore how identity, lived experience, and support systems shape the making of a physician.

This sculptural work examines the tension between institutional medicine and the diverse identities that sustain and transform it.

Methods/Process

The work consists of two hand-built ceramic sculptures created using clay modeling, imprinting, firing, and glazing techniques. One sculpture is minimally fired and matte, emphasizing rigidity and permanence, while the second is fully fired and glazed to highlight warmth, colour, and organic growth. Symbolic elements, including fingerprints, botanical motifs, and figurative forms, were intentionally incorporated to represent lineage, care, and transformation. The paired sculptures are presented together and contextualized by a stethoscope to situate the work within medical practice.

Statement/Identity Link

The first sculpture depicts a rigid, grey form bearing the Rod of Asclepius, representing the medical institution. The serpent is rendered in vibrant colours, reflecting marginalized identities and symbolizing the enduring values of medicine that draw individuals from diverse backgrounds despite systemic barriers. Surrounding fingerprints, imprints of family members, represent the unseen networks of support essential to surviving medical training.

The second sculpture, a brightly glazed basket adorned with leaves and flowers, represents personal and cultural origins. Within it rests a butterfly symbolizing transformation and caregiving, referencing the artist’s lived experience supporting a sibling with severe neurological disability following childhood meningoencephalitis. Together, the sculptures illustrate medicine as a convergence of institutional structures and lived identities, emphasizing that wellbeing, empathy, and healing are inseparable from who clinicians are and what they carry into practice.

Background: This presentation will focus on the experiences of mental health service users who have engaged in advocacy work in Ontario to improve mental healthcare and policy. Historically, mental health service users have been largely excluded from influencing mental health policy and practice, with decision-making dominated by psychiatric professionals and institutions rooted in biomedical authority (Costa et al., 2012). Mental health service users have important knowledge to share since they are resourceful and are able to bring their educational, intellectual, artistic, and practical abilities from their lives to politically engage and create networks that lead to improved mental healthcare services (Boschma et al., 2014; Morrow, 2017). When decision makers listen to the voices of mental health service users, it allows mental health service users to influence mental healthcare and policy in ways that reflect their diverse experiences and are beneficial to them.
Methodology: Semi-structured interviews through Zoom were conducted with 20 mental health service users who have engaged in advocacy work in Ontario to improve mental healthcare and policy in order to learn about their experiences. They also completed an online demographic survey through Qualtrics.
Results: Participants were motivated to do advocacy work because of their own lived experience and desire to help others. Their advocacy work focused on education, peer support, increasing collaboration across sectors, and policies. Participants’ advocacy work has made impacts through policy change, service creation, organizational change, awareness raising, and helping others. Participants said that promising approaches for improving mental healthcare and policy are increasing funding, increasing supports, greater collaboration in the sector, and including people with lived experience in decision-making. Participants encourage people who want to do advocacy work to practice self-care, have their voice heard, and build relationships.

Ayesha is a PhD student in the health program at York University and her research focuses on understanding the mental health service user experience of engaging in advocacy work to improve mental healthcare and policy in Ontario. Ayesha has published poetry in Front Lines: Until the Words Run Pure and Front Lines: Bent not Broken. She has also published a paper on patient experiences of using mental health services in Canada in the International Health Trends and Perspectives Journal as well as a book chapter on biomedical dominance in mental healthcare and policy in the book Institutionalized Madness: The Interplay of Psychiatry and Society’s Institutions.

COI Disclosure: I do not have an affiliation (financial or otherwise) with any for-profit or not-for-profit organizations

Background/Purpose
When efficiency dominates conversations, it is easy to overlook the stories behind patients. We wanted to bridge this gap by linking art and care through photography. We aim to highlight human dignity by capturing portraits and personal testimonies of individuals who have experienced vulnerability, such as refugees, Indigenous peoples, people experiencing homelessness, members of the LGBTQ+ community, and those living with chronic illnesses.

Methods
Each participant is invited to take part in an interview exploring their personal story, followed by a photographic portrait session. Informed consent is obtained with clear explanations of image use, withdrawal rights, and portrait approval. Narratives and images are co-curated with participants to ensure authenticity, agency, and respectful representation of their experiences. We are currently collecting testimonies and coordinating exhibition logistics. Particular challenges include ensuring meaningful consent, cultural sensitivity, and equitable representation across diverse communities.

Results
We anticipate that the exhibition will bring together visitors to reflect on the portraits and stories presented. In a society as multicultural as ours, this activity aims to encourage a sincere desire to better understand one another and to invite everyone to look at others with greater humanity. We plan to present the results. The results will be presented on the poster through selected photographic portraits and excerpts from participants’ narratives, allowing viewers to engage directly with the lived experiences represented.

Discussion
This exhibition seeks to create connections between the portraits and the visitors, while encouraging dialogue. It invites viewers to question prejudices and first impressions. The images, along with written testimonies, tell life stories and offer a new dimension to empathy and connection. Throughout history, art has served as an accessible means of expression, whether through paintings depicting historical events or as a tool for social critique.

Second year Medical student

COI Disclosure: I do not have an affiliation (financial or otherwise) with any for-profit or not-for-profit organizations

Aya-Maria Bouyarden, second year in medical school, has a background in Biological Sciences. She has interests in the intersection of scientific innovation and human experience.

COI Disclosure: I do not have an affiliation (financial or otherwise) with any for-profit or not-for-profit organizations

This poster presentation examines “On Paper: Toward a Queer of Colour Archival Practice," an ongoing community-engaged research project which explores how art-making, storytelling, and archiving function as practices of care and identity formation for 2SLGBTQ+ youth in Toronto’s eastern, diverse suburb of Scarborough.

Originally developed through a collaboration between the University of Toronto and a local arts non-profit program, the project seeks to build a digital archive documenting the creative and affective histories of queerness in Scarborough - a space too often omitted from dominant, downtown-centric queer narratives and histories. Through creative practices such as postcards-making, collage, and painting workshops facilitated by local QTBIPOC artists and researchers, the project investigates how acts of creation may foster individual and collective well-being.

Inspired by and building on works such as Ann Cvetkovich’s concept of archives of feeling, Saidiya Hartman’s storytelling/critical fabulations, and José Esteban Muñoz’s vision of queer futurity, the project reimagines archives not only as repositories of information but as technologies of survival which hold trauma, care, and possibility. Participants’ art and testimonies show how queer of colour youth cultivate resilience and belonging even in conditions marked by spatial, racial, and socioeconomic marginalization.

Anchored in the frameworks of health humanities and participatory/qualitative research, we argue that creative archival practices constitute a critical mode of health intervention. By foregrounding lived experience and affective knowledge, Queer Scarborough “On Paper” expands what counts as evidence in health and humanities research, offering an ethics of care rooted in co-creation and representation.

Ultimately, this presentation situates Scarborough’s queer communities within broader discourses of identity, wellness, and place-making. It demonstrates that artistic and archival practices - especially those led by youth - may reorient understandings of health away from purely clinical models toward relational, interdependent, and imaginative practices of flourishing.

Andrea Charise, PhD, is Associate Professor in the Department of Health & Society and Acting Associate Vice-Principal Research and Innovation (AVPRI) – Strategic Initiatives & Partnerships at the University of Toronto Scarborough (UTSC), Canada. Visit www.andreacharise.ca for more information.

COI Disclosure: I do not have an affiliation (financial or otherwise) with any for-profit or not-for-profit organizations

"Still life." is a reinterpretation of Psyche Revived by Cupid’s Kiss.

The anesthesiologist takes on the role of Eros, holding a figure ascending from the deathless sleep that defines them as patient.

Identity is shaped beneath the white coat, the tubes and machines, by past medical or surgical history, academic and clinical training, but also expectations, beliefs and values, and the intimate trust each carries, of themselves and in the other.

Here, identity is not reduced to a nametag, or to an ID bracelet. It is held in suspension. The patient's body is elevated, carefully, not only with the burden of diagnosis and physical vulerability, but also with what cannot be charted. The anesthesiologist, in turn, holds this duality. Beyond expertise and procedural responsibility, they carry, intuition shaped by years of practice, the subtle cues of the patient's presence and response to the hostile environment of an operating room.

Disease and procedures cannot solely define identity. Yet, it also cannot be untouched by them. Medicine becomes part of the patient’s identity, etched physically through scars and bodily memory, and emotionally through anticipation, recovery. Beyond, it reshapes how future moments are encountered. How the body is felt, how vulnerability is remembered and how illness heals. What happens when life is still, does not end when consciousness returns. It reverberates forward, altering how the self moves through both suffering and joy, long after the body is lowered back into the world.

The figures translate the mythical embrace of Psyche onto Eros, the same way patients close their eyes and awaken again in the same hold from their last contact..

This scene was created with colored pencils on standard black paper, and accompanied by an original poem. It is inspired, with consent and anonymity preserved, by the experiences of the parties involved.

Background: Dr. Kilpatrick, a child psychiatrist and the first female graduate of Dalhousie Medical School, donated an archive containing a mix of her academic and personal papers to the school. While doing research on this archive I have often been struck by the ways the person bleeds through the paper, by the record of the choices she made about how to represent herself.

Process: While going through Kilpatrick's archive I was struck by the variation in what she had included - we can see her high school grades, her notes for her published papers, letters to other doctors who were her friends, thank you notes from patients, and other pieces, such as a map of Long Island, whose significance were known only to her. To write this story, I picked a few of the archived pieces that felt most compelling to me and tried to imagine the mind of the woman who decided to preserve them.

Relation to theme: I think the Kilpatrick archive is a remarkable example of the different identities a physician can hold, both personal and professional, both chosen and assigned. While I will never be able to ask her, I have to wonder if something similar was on Dr. Kilpatrick's mind as she assembled her collection. The decision to include items of personal significance alongside her academic papers strikes me as a very purposeful request to be seen as whole, complex, and human by the historians and physicians of the future. This is an archive that resists reducing a person to a one line label, similarly to how this conference revolves around resisting reducing our patients, or ourselves, to a single identity.

Background/Purpose
Indigenous women and families in Canada have long endured the harms of medical colonialism, forced and coerced sterilizations, obstetric racism, and the erasure of Indigenous birthing knowledge (Basile & Bouchard, 2022; Shaheen-Hussain et al., 2023; Webb, 2023). These practices have produced intergenerational trauma and violations of bodily autonomy that meet the United Nations’ definition of genocide. Nursing, as both a caring and colonial profession, has been implicated through its historical participation in Indian hospitals, residential schools, and the biomedical control of birth (Symenuk et al., 2020). Yet nursing also carries transformative potential to confront these legacies and advance decolonial, strengths-based, and relationship-centred care.
Methods/Process
Illuminating Shadows is a mixed-media shadow-art installation created from discarded hospital objects, IV bags, vials, and newborn hats. A single light source projects the shadow of a family holding a newborn, symbolizing resilience, interdependence, and the enduring light of Indigenous wisdom. The creative process drew on decolonial and arts-based methodologies, including relational aesthetics and critical reflection, to bridge artistic practice with advocacy (Basile et al., 2023).
Findings and Insights
The artwork reframes colonial shadows as spaces for truth-telling and relational restoration. Three key insights emerged:
1. Colonial Shadows – coercive obstetric and sterilization practices as mechanisms of colonial control.
2. Families Left in the Dark – biomedical authority obscures relational strengths.
3. Illumination as Decolonization – centring Indigenous knowledge reframes care as collective rather than purely clinical.
Statement on Identity and Theme
By transforming literal shadows into metaphors for collective healing, this work explores how identity, both personal and professional, is shaped by colonial histories. It invites nurses to reclaim an ethical identity grounded in truth, justice, and relational accountability, aligning with the conference theme of identity as an evolving practice of decolonization and care.

Second-year Master of Science in Nursing student at McGill University, committed to improving access to healthcare, reproductive justice, health equity, and decolonizing healthcare through research, advocacy, and knowledge translation. In addition to her work in nursing, she is passionate about the arts as a medium for advocacy and storytelling. Her creative projects often explore the intersection of policy, practice, and social justice

COI Disclosure: I do not have an affiliation (financial or otherwise) with any for-profit or not-for-profit organizations

Background

Medical education trains learners to assess patients through histories, physical examinations, and investigations, often presenting this approach as objective. While this approach is important for efficient patient care, it can obscure how patients’ identities and multiple social contexts intersect to shape their experiences of illness and care. This poem emerges from my experiences as a third-year medical student in clerkship, using poetry as a reflective practice to examine how medical training shapes how learners read, interpret and translate patient narratives.

Process

This poem was developed through reflective and reflexive writing informed by clinical encounters during my clerkship year. Using metaphor, this work draws parallels between close reading of texts and medical assessment during a patient encounter. Clinical encounters and self-reflection are interwoven through the poem to examine how lived experiences are read and translated into clinical narratives.

Artist Statement and Link to the Conference Theme of Identity

This poem invites readers and listeners to grapple with the tension between how medical training teaches clinicians to assess patients and the multiple languages through which patients speak. By positioning patients, trainees, and clinicians as “bodies of texts” in conversation, this poem explores whose stories are centered and whose are often pushed to the margins. Poetry is used as both a reflective and reflexive tool to examine how clinicians and those in training engage with patient stories and their own, questioning assumptions of neutrality and objectivity in clinical encounters. Through acts of re-reading, unlearning, and revision, the poem highlights the utility of the arts and humanities in shaping how trainees and clinicians might attend to patient care from a broader, more compassionate perspective, and explores how personal identity also influences patient care.

Background: This poem was first written for submission to the Longview Journal at the University of Calgary and performed at the 2025 Foothills Medical Arts Showcase. The purpose of the poem is to capture the isolation that I have felt in the pursuit of becoming a doctor.

Methods: My poetry is confessional and free verse. This format allows me to lyrically express how I feel and make sense of my own emotions and life experiences without rigid structure. I often write about the people and places I love in my hometown of Vancouver and in my other homes of Toronto, Hamilton, and now Calgary. My process is not having one - I try not to force art. I write poetry when it comes to me.

Artist Statement: This poem is an ode to the out-of-province medical student. Sometimes, achieving this dream of becoming a doctor places us far away from our family, friends, and partners - if not geographically, then emotionally or spiritually. I have found that my newfound identity as a medical student is often at odds with my other identities as a daughter, sister, cousin, and partner. It can be hard to embody all these roles at once and I often feel guilty for missing out on valuable time with my family. This poem illustrates my longing for family time, but it also hints at the fact that I really love being a medical student. This has been a personal dream of mine for as long as I can remember. So, while it is strange to live out this dream without my family, I draw strength from all the different versions of me and am grateful to have this abundance of identities (even if I don’t quite know how to balance them yet).

Title of the artwork : Growth

Presenter has no affiliation

Learning objective : For the public to appreciate the art work and appreciate the patient's perspective of an injury.

Background : I had an injury and made a visual art piece following it.

Method : (In the visual art world we call this medium), I used Prismacolor pencils on gray toned paper.

This is an art piece I drew following a distal finger tip amputation I suffered. The medical intervention I had was to let my fingers tips heal by secondary intention with dressing changes every two days. As well as weekly occupational therapy. The fingers affected are my right index and middle finger (I am right-handed) so this injury greatly affects my right-hand dexterity. Aside from the hypersensitivity I still experience, I also struggle with the physical appearance of my fingers. This artwork represents the stages of recovery my fingers went through, from the X-ray immediately after the accident to the tip regrown with scar. This is also the first art piece I realized after my accident. I've attached the artwork in "Part 2" of the submission.

In the past I have also produced art pieces following medical experiences I've had. I also plan on producing more, as I am able to draw more and more following my accident. If selected, I would have more art pieces to accompany this one.

Emmanuel is a young visual artist who uses arts to express his experience in receiving medical care. Themes included in his art include his body and interventions to it, corporal loss, and the role of providers in his health.

COI Disclosure: I do not have an affiliation (financial or otherwise) with any for-profit or not-for-profit organizations

Background:
This project explores embroidery as a reflexive and arts-based extension of Organic Inquiry. Situated within transpersonal and decolonial research traditions, this work positions embroidery as a contemplative and creative methodology that transforms affect, intuition, and embodied knowing into material form. It uses embroidery to hold complexity and multiplicity without needing resolution, creating space for alternative and reparative ways of knowing in medical education research.

Researcher Positionality and Reflexivity:
As a PhD researcher in medical education, I occupy a position both within and outside the field. My standpoint as a woman of colour and immigrant to Canada informs every layer of this inquiry. Reflexivity is not peripheral but integral, as I navigate questions of belonging, authority, and representation within colonial academic structures.

Methods
Guided by the principles of Organic Inquiry, I present embroidery pieces reflecting on the emotional and intellectual stages of developing my doctoral proposal. The process follows a sequence of reflection, design, and stitching, integrating reflexive journaling throughout. Drawing on embroidery traditions relevant to the sites I study, to embody emotional states and evolving perspectives. Triangulation across embroidery practice, reflexive writing, and dialogic interpretation will support meaning-making and methodological integrity.

“Results”
The process surfaces layered emotions (uncertainty, resistance, and care) embedded in researching race and gender in medical education. Embroidery as a subliminal method and metaphor, slows the research process and stitches inquiry to the embodied presence.

Conclusion
I share how I use embroidery to reimagine research as an embodied act of care and resistance. The approach offers a decolonial, tactile method through which academic knowledge is not only analyzed but is transformed and stitched into being.

Abhinya Gulasingam, is a PhD student under the Department of Innovation in Medical Education at the Faculty of Medicine, University of Ottawa. She recently completed her Masters in Public Health at the University of Ottawa, where most of her research focused on structurally marginalized individuals, including women of color and immigrants, examining how their experiences are often left out of dominant health narratives. She is an early career researcher with a commitment to bringing a critical and interdisciplinary lens to questions of policy, power, and justice in health, with a focus on reimagining more equitable futures in medical education and global health.

COI Disclosure: I do not have an affiliation (financial or otherwise) with any for-profit or not-for-profit organizations

Sofia Hadjarab is a second-year medical student passionate about the intersection of art and humanity in medicine. She joined the Regards humains project to highlight the stories behind people’s experiences, believing that every story deserves to be seen and heard. 

COI Disclosure: I do not have an affiliation (financial or otherwise) with any for-profit or not-for-profit organizations

Between Compression and Breath is a diptych of two abstract expressionist oil paintings that explores how identity is shaped under pressure and how wellbeing emerges through the reclamation of space, breath, and permeability. Health professional identity often develops within institutional environments marked by containment, endurance, and performance. While the arts and humanities are increasingly recognized as supportive of wellbeing, the affective and embodied conditions through which identity is formed are less often made visible. This work approaches identity not as a fixed role, but as a lived, material process unfolding between compression and release.

The diptych was created using oil paint applied slowly in layered gestures with palette knives and brushes. Oil was chosen for its viscosity and resistance, allowing accumulation, stratification, and weight to remain present on the surface. The process emphasized non-corrective mark-making, where each stroke was left intact rather than revised or optimized, preserving tension, interruption, and density as ethical and embodied commitments. Variations in texture, color saturation, and openness were used to evoke bodily states such as containment, rupture, and breath.

The first painting depicts identity under compression––fragmented, stratified, and held together through endurance and pressure. The second painting opens into movement, breath, and permeability, suggesting identity as capable of release, reorientation, and becoming. Viewed together, the works reflect the tension experienced by many health professionals as they navigate institutional demands while striving to preserve personhood and wellbeing. Rather than representing illness or recovery directly, the diptych attends to the embodied conditions through which identity is shaped, constrained, and gently re-formed, aligning with the conference theme by foregrounding the profound relationship between identity, health, and wellbeing.

Background / Purpose:

This project presents Fire Poems, a hybrid poetic form combining text and installation, where poems are physically constructed and then burned in politically and ecologically charged landscapes. Inspired by Robert Montgomery’s fire-based textual performances, my Fire Poems extend his aesthetic project into the realm of health humanities and Indigenous-informed environmental ethics. My works have been installed in many geographies, including on the shores of Lake Winnipeg during 2025’s wildfire-heavy spring, and along the Texas-Mexico border during the first months of Trump’s second presidency—sites marked by ecological crisis and colonial violence. This is new, unpublished work.

Methods / Process:

Each Fire Poem is crafted through a multi-phase process: writing, editing, die-cutting letters, assembling installations, and performing the burns. The words are shaped by the ethics and politics of place and identity, and the installations are constrained by material realities—wind, drought, border surveillance, etc. The installations are ephemeral, designed to interact with nature and risk, emphasizing the body’s role in art-making and the temporality, yet power, of protest. The process is documented through photography and reflection, forming a living archive of poetic resistance, even if the words have already burned to ashes.

Statement on Identity:

Drawing on Brian Burkhart’s concept of delocality, Fire Poems resist the abstraction of voice from land and lived experience. Burkhart reminds us that voice is not merely sound or symbol—it is physical, material-based, and rooted in place. Fire Poems embody this principle, re-localizing poetic expression by situating it in specific geographies and histories. Fire becomes both medium and message: a metaphor for transformation, the evolution of poetic form, and a protest against neocolonial erasure. In this way, Fire Poems enact a poetics of identity that is materially grounded, ethically engaged, and deeply attuned to the health of bodies, communities, and ecosystems.

Evan J (he/they) is a researcher, writer, and community collaborator whose work engages the intersections of northern literature, northern health, and socio-ecological justice. Evan holds an MA in Literary Studies from York University and has worked extensively in northern communities. Their roles have spanned from front-line social services to nonprofit managerial work. For several years, Evan managed an arts-based Indigenous literacy initiative in Northwestern Ontario, working primarily on reserve. Now a PhD student at UNBC and a researcher with the university’s Health Arts Research Centre (HARC), Evan’s current research explores how northern art—specifically literary fiction—can illuminate the intricacies of northern health inequities and potentially offer unexplored solutions. Their writing spans academic and literary genres, reflecting a deep commitment to ethical land relations and collaborative knowledge-making. Evan is also an experienced literary curator and workshop facilitator. From 2023 to 2024, they served as Programming Coordinator for the THIN AIR Literary Festival in Winnipeg, curating events that foreground marginalized voices and community storytelling. They have facilitated poetry and creative writing workshops in remote First Nations schools, at literary festivals, and through national arts organizations, often focusing on the therapeutic and educational power of art in health contexts. Outside of research, Evan is an avid birder with over 400 species seen, and a passionate long-distance runner who, last year, ran 484 kilometres across Manitoba in seven days.

COI Disclosure: I do not have an affiliation (financial or otherwise) with any for-profit or not-for-profit organizations

Yousr Jalal, a second-year medical student at the Université de Montréal, has experience in mental health and is interested in the ways art can foster human connection.

COI Disclosure: I do not have an affiliation (financial or otherwise) with any for-profit or not-for-profit organizations

Title

Between the Blocks and the White Coat

Presenter: Nina Kucheran, MD Candidate (University of Ottawa)

Background / Purpose

High-performance sport and medicine share a culture of discipline, sacrifice, and relentless pursuit of excellence. While this overlap can foster resilience, it can also narrow professional identity and increase burnout when goals are not achieved. This creative narrative explores the psychological and emotional rupture that occurs when an elite athletic identity is lost, and how it can become a site for growth and professional identity formation in medicine.

Methods / Process

This work takes the form of an autobiographical narrative written through reflective practice and narrative medicine principles. Drawing on lived experience as a former NCAA Division I swimmer and Olympic Trials finalist who transitioned into medicine shortly after athletic loss, the piece weaves personal memory, embodied experience, and literary metaphor to examine identity disruption and reconstruction. The narrative was developed through iterative writing, revision, and thematic reflection, guided by concepts of narrative coherence, moral injury, and meaning-making.

Statement of the Work and Link to the Theme of Identity

Between the Blocks and the White Coat traces the author’s journey from “almost Olympian” to physician-in-training, illuminating how identity rooted solely in performance can fracture when the body fails or dreams end. The piece explores grief, illness, perfectionism, and the pressure to be exceptional—forces that shape both elite athletes and medical trainees. Through this lived experience, the narrative reframes success as an evolving concept rather than a singular outcome. It offers insight into how health professionals can integrate multiple identities, embrace vulnerability, and cultivate sustainable, compassionate practice. By sharing a deeply personal story, this work contributes to the conference theme of Identity by highlighting how professional identity is not inherited or achieved, but continually re-authored through loss, reflection, and meaning.

Hybrid (in-person and virtual) sessions, including those involving medical humanities, are increasingly ubiquitous in health professional education since the COVID-19 pandemic. Ed’s Story, a verbatim play written from the journal of an adolescent/young adult (AYA) osteosarcoma patient, has been utilized in medical education at Canadian institutions for over a decade. However, we have never integrated Ed’s Story into sessions for pediatric resident physicians (PRPs) or pediatric oncology healthcare professionals (HCPs). We explored how hybrid sessions using Ed’s Story, combining both passive viewing of a recording of the play followed by reader’s theatre (RT) of the script, impacted PRPs and HCPs working in the provincial pediatric oncology program at our tertiary children’s hospital. Hybrid sessions were feasible and enjoyable; participant empathy increased post-session; and the majority of participants preferred watching the recording over RT. Inductive thematic analysis of narrative feedback identified five themes: new or broadened understanding of interdisciplinary pediatric oncology care and patient/family illness experiences; recognition of AYA care needs; appreciation for nuances of advanced communication; acknowledgement of new skills gained; and session/logistic feedback. These results will inform future iterations of Ed’s Story to optimize content delivery and session structure.

Marina is a third-year medical student at University of Saskatchewan College of Medicine.

COI Disclosure: I do not have an affiliation (financial or otherwise) with any for-profit or not-for-profit organizations

Artwork Title: Trajectory

Background/purpose: Trajectory is a fictionalized narrative rooted in lived experience, written during my second year of undergraduate studies and shared now as a first-year medical student. The piece explores how identity—shaped by family relationships, immigration, and intergenerational traumas—intersect with health, illness, and the act of witnessing a loved one move through the healthcare system. It aims to capture the liminality of waiting: the suspended time of hospital corridors, classrooms, and family histories replayed in the uncontrollable space between.

Methods/process: The work employs creative non-fiction techniques, retelling clinical experiences through the imagined mind, catastrophizing during medical uncertainty. Scientific language (physiology, physics, statistics) is interwoven with memory and metaphor to reflect an attempt to impose order on grief. Caught between past and present, the piece mirrors how crisis collapses linear time and forces a re-examination of personal and familial narratives.

Artist statement: Trajectory situates identity as inseparable from health and healthcare—not only as a biological state, but a life’s story of migration, labour, love, resentment, and growth. Through the lens of a child waiting for their parent undergoing open-heart surgery, the piece depicts how grief is often deferred, compartmentalized, and released only in moments of imposed stillness. A father’s immigrant journey, professional sacrifices, and strained family dynamics position illness as both a physiological breaking point and forced reckoning with inherited histories. Through motion and acceleration, Trajectory suggests how health and illness are shaped long before clinical intervention—instead, representing the cumulative story of one’s life, identity, and unspoken emotional inheritance. Healthcare encounters are never isolated events, but deeply entangled with who we are, where we come from, and how we love.

Abstract 1. Ten Years

Medical training requires forward looking commitment amid ongoing uncertainty. This poem reflects on the next decade of practice and life, exploring how anticipation, fear, and confidence coexist during the formation of a professional self.

The poem is built through intentional pairing. Each fear about the future is placed beside evidence drawn from lived experience and clinical encounters. Rather than resolving tension, the writing uses spatial language and proximity to allow opposing truths to stand together. The process prioritizes specificity and restraint, resisting abstraction in favour of moments that have already occurred.

The work presents identity as something formed in parallel rather than certainty. By holding fear and proof in the same space, the poem reflects an emerging medical identity that accepts uncertainty while remaining anchored in demonstrated values and actions. Identity here is cumulative, shaped by what has already been carried forward.

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Abstract 2. Take Care

The phrase “take care” is often used at the end of clinical encounters, yet it carries ethical and emotional weight that is rarely examined. This piece explores that closing moment as a site of transition for both patient and clinician.

Written as lyrical creative non fiction, the piece centres on a single phrase and expands its meaning through attention to language, silence, and physical space. The narrative remains confined to the examination room, focusing on what can be offered, what must be withheld, and what cannot be carried beyond the encounter. The writing emphasizes clarity and containment rather than reassurance.

The work locates medical identity within limits. It reflects an understanding that care includes recognition of boundaries, role reversal, and release. By examining the moment where responsibility ends, the piece frames professional identity as relational, grounded, and shaped by knowing when to let go.

Explanation/Link:

“Golden Child” narrates my reflection on my brother’s diagnosis of ADHD, my immigrant Chinese parents’ deeply cultural response to his disclosure, and their effect on how I came to understand my place in the world.

This lived experience developed my appreciation of health as whole-person, biopsychosocial wellbeing, and identity as a key mediator of how we respond to illness. My family’s cultural identity—and their associated perceptions around mental illness—deeply impacted our psychological wellbeing and (in)ability to form healthy support networks.

Process:

This work depicts the tension between my family’s cultural values and the Western model of mental health. My positionality as a second-generation immigrant, raised with both Canadian and Chinese cultural values, was instrumental in my process of mediating and ‘translating’ this conflict within my family. Accordingly, I explored key Mandarin idioms to contextualize the cultural values we grappled with while coming to a mutual understanding.

Purpose:

According to the WHO, as of 2021, “nearly 1 in every 7 people (1.1 billion) around the world were living with a mental disorder” (https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/mental-disorders). Despite their prevalence, mental disorders remain stigmatized in many cultures. A lack of understanding of mental ill-health poses barriers for those living with mental disorders in receiving support, including from their own cultural community.

The purpose of this work is to demonstrate how a mental health diagnosis can have far-reaching implications on an individual and their family’s wellbeing, especially in the absence of culturally appropriate education.

The work ends with a commentary on how increased awareness of and access to mental health supports has shifted society’s perception towards mental disorders, from one of condemnation to care. I hope that by sharing this work, health professionals, educators, and learners can better understand the importance of culturally competent support for those with mental disorders and their families.

Background/Purpose
As medical students, we live our lives mostly unexamined. Many of us are anxious about our future, weighed down by the increasing demand for productivity. It feels as if we have lost our sense of self.
One student experiencing these same feelings decided to embark on a poetry project to examine herself and find meaning in the seemingly mundane. Rooted in her interest in psychiatry, this project inspired her to reflect.Through reading and writing, the student started to contemplate on her own past and present, and ultimately, discovered much more than just her reasons for interest in psychiatry.

Methods
The student began by identifying a theme and developed a project exploring the concept of “madness.” She selected readings from philosophy, psychoanalytic theory, literature, history, and personal narratives. Through these readings, reflection of her own past and connection to psychiatry began. She started to examine her own experience in mental health, and wrote poems that blended personal narrative with social commentary.

Results
The medical student gained a deeper understanding of her passion for psychiatry, and her attitude in medical school began to shift. She approached learning with renewed joy and eagerness, reflected upon the kind of physician she desires to become, and found a sense of purpose and direction. She clearly identified her interdisciplinary interests in the humanities and is now developing a self-guided humanities curriculum to pursue alongside her medical training. She is also seeking to engage other medical students in similar reflective projects.

Discussion
The exploration of her curiosity towards psychiatry led this medical student on the road of discovery. She remembered the early days of medical school—days filled with anxiety and a sense of purposelessness.Through reading, contemplation, and writing she was able to find herself again.

Yifan Mo is a medical student interested in Psychiatry, psychoanalysis, poetry, and philosophy.

COI Disclosure: I do not have an affiliation (financial or otherwise) with any for-profit or not-for-profit organizations

Background/Purpose
Child and youth mental health is continuing to decline post pandemic [1]. Current treatment approaches are illness-centered [2], often leading to negative effects on social identity development [3]. Social prescribing, which is currently being offered to youth in several settings at the Children’s Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO), is a novel person-centered approach that seeks to build on patient strengths by connecting youth to community-based activities, including the arts, athletics, or community groups. For this presentation, we will focus on elevating participant voices across multiple social prescribing initiatives at CHEO through focus groups and interviews, highlighting how participation can enhance outcomes and help participants feel better understood by their health care teams.

Methods
Qualitative data from focus groups and interviews with patients and clinicians was collected. and analysed using deductive thematic analysis. Both clinician and youth perspectives on how social prescribing can enhance care and help build bridges between patients and their care teams will be presented.

Results
Several themes relating to social connectedness, self-expression, and improved mental wellbeing were identified in the qualitative data analyzed. In addition, results demonstrate that youth feel better understood by their health care teams, and clinicians have a deeper understanding of their patients' strengths when social prescriptions are a part of their care.

Discussion
While this study demonstrates the positive impact that social prescriptions can have on patients' well-being, it also has the potential to provide clinicians and youth with an enhanced mutual feeling of understanding. These results will be used to inform future social prescribing practices at CHEO.

Nadia is a University of Ottawa student studying Biomedical Science. She is also someone with lived experience with the mental healthcare system and works as a youth advisor for the CHEO Research Institute, CAMH, and the Knowledge Institute on Child and Youth Mental Health and Addiction.

COI Disclosure: I do not have an affiliation (financial or otherwise) with any for-profit or not-for-profit organizations

**Background**
Before medical school, I was a paramedic and had a variety of experiences--good and bad.

**Purpose**
Sharing how life in the medical field is affected by perception, and experience.

**Methods**
Diving into experience; non-experimental.

**Process**
Reflection, and satisfaction of poetry. A simple approach where initial inspiration was followed.

This poem uses imagery to support the position of a provider that accepts abuse while still providing care in an objective way. Alike to elements mentioned in the poem: roads, flowers, sunshine; these are all necessary and yet we complain about them all.

Background/Purpose:
Stigma toward individuals with substance use disorders remains pervasive in medical settings and is often reinforced by implicit biases formed early in medical education. While biomedical curricula emphasize the pathophysiology of addiction, they rarely engage with the emotional and human dimensions of suffering. This project explores whether reading and discussing poems about addiction [such as “Portrait of an Alcoholic with Doubt and Kingfisher” (Kaveh Akbar), “My Brother at 3 A.M.” (Natalie Diaz), “Praying Drunk” (Andrew Hudgins), and “A River Is a Body Running” (Steven Espada Johnson)] can enhance medical students’ empathetic understanding of patients living with addiction.

Methods:
A mixed-methods pilot study was designed for first- and second-year medical students. Participants will attend a 60-minute session that includes (1) guided readings of four poems centered on addiction and identity, (2) facilitated discussion linking poetic imagery to clinical encounters, and (3) pre- and post-session surveys using the Medical Condition Regard Scale and qualitative reflection prompts. Responses will be analyzed using paired t-tests for quantitative data and thematic analysis for qualitative narratives.

Results:
I expect that findings will suggest a statistically significant increase in mean Medical Condition Regard Scale scores following the session (p < 0.05). I predict that thematic analysis will involve three domains: (1) recognition of addiction as a lived, embodied experience; (2) reframing of “noncompliance” as narrative complexity; and (3) heightened awareness of personal emotional responses in clinical contexts. Data will be collected in early 2026.

Discussion:
Integrating poetry into medical education may serve as a powerful, identity-centered tool for cultivating empathy and reducing stigma toward people with addiction. Literature provides a bridge between scientific understanding and human experience, encouraging students to see patients as whole, storied individuals rather than pathologies.

Born and raised around Milwaukee, Wisconsin, I grew up in a warm, loving Pakistani family and with a book always in my hand. I studied English at Case Western Reserve University before working at Epic Systems for a year before I matriculated to medical school this past July.


COI Disclosure: I do not have an affiliation (financial or otherwise) with any for-profit or not-for-profit organizations.

N/A

Submission for the Medical Student & Resident Creative Writing and Visual Art Contest

Context / Objective
Patients who outlive a terminal prognosis often enter an unrecognized liminal space: no longer actively dying, yet unable to return to a future-oriented life. This narrative project aimed to explore the emotional, existential, and identity-related dimensions of this “in-between” through a legacy partnership between a medical student and a patient with a terminal illness.

Methods / Process
As part of the Making a Legacy Palliative Care Project, I was paired with “Robert,” a 55-year-old man who had been given weeks to live but continued to survive months beyond his hospice discharge. Over multiple meetings, we created a spiral-bound legacy booklet capturing his life story, personal reflections, and experiences of living beyond his expected prognosis. Conversations were unstructured, patient-led, and focused on meaning-making, fears, hopes, and identity in the context of prognostic uncertainty. Narrative observation and reflective practice were used to synthesize themes that emerged from our interactions.

Statement on Identity and Link to Conference Theme
Robert’s experience illuminated how identity becomes destabilized when the anticipated trajectory of dying is unexpectedly prolonged. Having already said his goodbyes, released future plans, and braced for closure, he found himself suspended between identities: no longer the vibrant traveler, teacher, and builder he once was, but not yet the dying person he had prepared to be. This prolonged “in-between” challenged both his sense of self and my assumptions as a trainee about what it means to care for someone at the end of life. His story revealed that identity is not fixed but continuously reshaped by uncertainty, illness, and the narratives we hold about time. Witnessing his experience highlighted the role of clinicians in affirming identity, presence, and personhood even when a prognosis, and life itself, defies expectations.

Background:
First Nations, Métis, and Inuit patients often face barriers in accessing healthcare and report negative experiences within the healthcare system. Patient–provider communication is a key determinant of care quality and cultural safety. This review aimed to identify communication strategies used by healthcare providers that can strengthen clinical interactions and promote trust and understanding.

Methods:
We conducted a scoping review of studies published since 2015 describing First Nations, Métis, and Inuit patients’ and healthcare providers’ perspectives on clinical communication in Canada. Data were extracted on verbal and non-verbal strategies, approaches to relationship-building, and use of language or interpreters. A thematic analysis was performed, and each study was assessed for Indigenous involvement in research.

Results:
Of 3,285 records screened, 105 were included. 21 papers did not specify Indigenous community involvement but supported findings from the studies that did. Four key themes were identified: (1) expressing empathy and acknowledging systemic challenges; (2) discussing traditional healing practices and holistic perspectives; (3) conducting history-taking in ways that respect autonomy and preferences; and (4) conveying medical information and collaborating with Indigenous interpreters. Across studies, active listening, openness, and patient-led dialogue were associated with more positive care experiences. A few population-specific guidelines were also identified (for example, questions that healthcare providers can ask to support shared decision-making with Inuit cancer patients).

Discussion:
This review highlights practical communication approaches that foster culturally safe, relational care. The findings contribute to ongoing conversations about decolonizing healthcare and advancing reconciliation by centering respect, reciprocity, and contextual understanding in clinical encounters.

Second year medical student interested in health communication and health systems research.

COI Disclosure: I do not have an affiliation (financial or otherwise) with any for-profit or not-for-profit organizations

Background: Parkinson’s disease (PD) is the second most common neurodegenerative disorder and represents a growing global health concern given increased longevity and an aging population. While PD is traditionally characterized by motor symptoms, non-motor manifestations including anxiety, depression, and apathy significantly affect quality of life and are linked to disruptions in dopaminergic, serotonergic, and limbic circuitry1,2. Pharmacologic treatments for these symptoms show limited efficacy, highlighting opportunities for complementary non-pharmacological therapies to meet this need. While music, dance, and auditory-based interventions have demonstrated efficacy in improving motor symptoms in PD3,4, studies examining their impact on non-motor symptoms are limited despite the evidence for these therapies in alleviating anxiety and depression in other populations5.

Methods: We conducted a narrative review of studies investigating the effects of music and dance on anxiety, depression, and apathy in PD. Searches were performed in PubMed, PsycInfo, and Academic Search Premier databases. Results were synthesized narratively due to heterogeneity in outcome measures.

Results: Thirty-four studies (n = 836) met inclusion criteria (18 dance, 8 music, and 8 combined music and movement interventions). Most dance intervention studies reported improvements in depression and emotional wellbeing. Music interventions showed significant improvements in depression and anxiety. Participants also felt a sense of belonging and connection. Results for studies combining music and movement were inconsistent. Although the longest program was 24 weeks, trends show longer and more frequent interventions were more likely to yield significant improvements in non-motor symptoms.

Discussion: Our findings suggest that beyond potential modulation of frontostriatal and limbic networks, engagement in music and dance may preserve social identity and foster belonging, thereby maintaining wellbeing in PD. By enhancing motivation and social connectedness, these interventions may counteract anxiety, apathy, and depressive symptoms, reinforcing self-concept. Ongoing work includes developing a neurobiological and psychosocial framework to guide future studies and clinical applications.

Shahrzad Rahmanian is a 3rd year medical student at Dalhousie Medicine New Brunswick. Prior to medical school, she completed a MSc in Cell and Systems Biology at the University of Toronto, with her thesis focusing on behavioural characterization of a zebrafish genetic model of dystonia. Her other research interests include migraine, as well as music and dance therapy in Parkinson's disease. Outside of academia, she is passionate about fitness, nature photography, and playing classical piano.

COI Disclosure: I do not have an affiliation (financial or otherwise) with any for-profit or not-for-profit organizations

Background / Purpose

In the Absence of Feeling reflects on emotional hardening as a response to the demands of caregiving in healthcare. In environments where precision and composure are expected, creating emotional distance can become a way of coping, rather than a sign of apathy. This work emerged from observing how repeated encounters with vulnerability shape not only how care is delivered, but also how health professionals and trainees come to understand themselves and their own wellbeing.

Methods / Process

This acrylic painting depicts an anatomically rendered heart with a metallic, mechanical quality, suspended between two gloved hands. The heart's hardened surface contrasts with its familiar association with feeling. The sterile gloves reference both clinical care and emotional self-protection. Faint, circuit-like patterns in the background nod to the interconnected systems that structure care. The circular composition suggests containment and repetition, reflecting the emotional boundaries continuously created in clinical spaces.

Link to Identity Theme

The metallic heart serves as a metaphor for professional identity shaped through caregiving. Emotional hardening can act as a form of protection, allowing health professionals to remain resilient in high-pressure environments. At the same time, this armour can create distance from one’s own emotions and from a deeper connection with others. By holding these tensions in view, In the Absence of Feeling invites reflection on how identity, empathy, and self-preservation coexist in healthcare. The work positions artistic reflection as a meaningful way to engage with the emotional labor of care, supporting self-awareness, wellness, and growth in health professions education and practice.

Background/purpose
Migraine is a complex neurological disorder that affects about one in seven people worldwide and is a leading cause of disability among young adults. Although migraine with aura can include four phases (prodrome, aura, headache, and postdrome), many still perceive it as simply a headache. The sensory and cognitive disruptions that accompany migraine can be debilitating, yet they remain largely invisible to others.

Methods/Process:
I have lived with migraine since childhood and now I experience chronic migraine. Chronic migraine is defined as fifteen or more migraine days per month. I am a physician, board-certified in pathology, but chronic migraine has limited my ability to practice medicine. During this period, I turned to art as both refuge and expression. Through digital painting and animation, I visualize my migraine auras, experiences that are otherwise unseen and difficult to describe. I recreate their shapes and movements as accurately as possible, often depicting the auras that awaken me from sleep. To date, I have created over 190 digital representations of my auras. The paintings feature dark backgrounds with a grey oval centre representing my visual field, capturing the shifting, luminous patterns that define each episode.

Statement linking to the conference theme:
Seeing the Unseen: Migraine conveys the lived experience of an invisible illness and invites others to see what is often hidden from view. My work bridges medicine and art, transforming personal experience into shared understanding and fostering empathy for those living with invisible illness.

With a background in medicine and pathology, Nahid Shukralla is a visual artist who lives with chronic migraine. She digitally paints and animates her migraine auras to raise awareness of the condition and to share the visual and emotional experience of living with an invisible illness.

COI Disclosure: I do not have an affiliation (financial or otherwise) with any for-profit or not-for-profit organizations

Media: Pencil and ink, on paper

This piece explores the delicate distance between structure and being, an essential reminder for those who study and practice medicine. Rendered in pencil, the skull anchors the viewer in the certainty of anatomy, its permanence both familiar and unequivocally ambiguous. Hovering beside it, a simple red-ink outline of a face gazes back upon its other self, offering an apprehensive reminder of this subtle separation.

The red line appears almost ghostlike, as though identity has momentarily lifted away from its physical form, prompting the viewer to question where the human experience truly resides. The choice of red interrupts the grayscale stillness, evoking the course of an artery, the pulse of life, and the rawness of vulnerability.

Through its minimalism and tension, the piece opens a space between anatomy and identity, allowing them to coexist, overlap, and gently drift apart. It encourages medical professionals to consider their patients as whole beings, reminding them that beneath every diagnosis is a person with thoughts, experiences, and an identity that extends beyond their underlying disease.

Flowers are rarely the most beautiful alone. Their beauty is highlighted when they grow together as a bunch, shaped by the same light, weather, and soil. And yet, this truth extends beyond such flowers.

At first glance, Roots depicts a familiar field of daisies: resilient, ordinary, and quietly abundant. On closer inspection, their forms subtly echo the medical symbol, suggesting how professional identity emerges not as a replacement of the self, but as something gently woven into who we already are.

The field becomes a metaphor for medicine as a collective practice: one rooted in shared purpose, interdependence, and care. On the surface, this identity is continuously surrounded by community and support from its own kind. Beneath the surface, unseen roots intertwine. These roots represent the lived experiences, relationships, cultures, and values that ground clinicians long before and after formal training. Though invisible, they shape how we listen, connect, and practice medicine with empathy.

Roots reflect identity as something cultivated slowly, nourished by both science and humanity, and sustained through connection rather than isolation. This work invites reflection on how understanding ourselves and one another can make medicine more human, more compassionate, and ultimately more healing.

I am writing to express an interest in creating a submission for the Creating Space 16 conference. I know this is unorthodox as artwork is expected to be finished by the Nov 3 deadline, but I do not have a current piece to submit, as it would be tailored to the conference. My submission would be a zine (short for magazine) that is created as part of a series on ‘Tending’ that I have been creating as ‘artivism’ as a healthcare provider in response to climate change.
My submission would expand on the themes of the conference, particularly on ‘identity’ in the context of tending for one’s self, others and the Earth. Zines have a great history of bringing activism, marginalized voices and art to others through self-publishing.
Copies would be available for everyone who attends the conference. I have previously had zines showcased at Saint Paul University for their 2025 Colloquium on the theme of Horizons: Encountering Diverse Perspectives, and I created a zine in partnership with the Ottawa Wildflower Seed Library for the National Day of Truth and Reconciliation in September and was distributed in Ottawa Public Libraries across the city.
While they can vary in size, my zine is printed, folded and cut on one piece of 8.5x11 paper, which becomes an 8-panel zine. I have attached examples of two zines (please note the panels are not in order, until folded). I would supply the display stand, accompanied by an 8x10 frame that includes explanation of zines and enough copies of the zine for all attendees. Copies of previous zines (seen in the attached PDF) can also be made available.
I would also be open to speaking about zines, or do a collaborative zine project as part of the conference- something I have previously done with groups.

Martha is a Facilitator with Living Healthy Champlain, where she designs and delivers workshops locally and at the provincial level for health care and social service providers, as well as individuals living with chronic conditions. She also runs a private psychotherapy practice and is currently pursuing a PhD in Interdisciplinary Research, focusing on climate-informed psychotherapy. Martha began her career as a Recreation Therapist, where she first explored therapeutic expressive arts- an approach she continues to weave into all her work. She considers herself ‘artist-ish.’

COI Disclosure: I do not have an affiliation (financial or otherwise) with any for-profit or not-for-profit organizations

“Traditions of Healing” is painted in the style of khiyamiya, a traditional Egyptian textile art which has been created for thousands of years, often featuring birds and plants. Throughout time and place, people have looked to birds to create meaning and identity from their natural environments. Local plants have been important in facilitating traditional healing methods. This painting features magpie birds, poplar leaves, wildrose flowers, sweetgrass, and yarrow, all native to Southern Alberta, where I grew up. The purpose of this painting is to show how tradition facilitates healing beyond the biomedical, encompassing emotional and spiritual connection with the natural environment of which we are all an equal component.

My process of creating this painting included learning about khiyamiya textiles and my natural environment. In 2023, I visited Khiyamiya Street in Cairo, Egypt to better understand the importance of natural symbolism in textile art from the artists themselves. I noticed the ubiquity and intelligence of the magpies through birdwatching in Calgary’s urban parks. I learned about the medicinal properties of plants native to Southern Alberta from the Indigenous Health Office. I used acrylic paints for my painting alongside paint I personally made from dried elderberries to incorporate elements of the natural environment within my painting.

Tradition and our natural environments form important components of our identities, influencing our physical, mental, and spiritual health. My piece is a means of connecting my Egyptian cultural identity alongside my identity having grown up in Southern Alberta. The incorporation of the magpie, one of the most intelligent birds associated with healing, and medicinal plants reflects my identity within medical education. My piece represents my view on identity in relation to the land, especially having an appreciation for Indigenous traditions that have stewarded the land.