Art and Nature in Pediatric Care (2025)
Art and Nature in Pediatric Care: Animating Nature’s Love will integrate artistic creation, nature connection, and healthcare practice through a series of workshops where pediatric inpatients create short stop-motion animations inspired by the natural world. The project’s goal is to foster wellbeing, creative agency, and a sense of belonging for young patients and their families while developing a sustainable model for art and nature engagement within hospital care.
During the planning and creation phases, lead artist Dr. Michelle Wilson and mentee Jennifer Plourde will collaborate with Dr. Anna Gunz (Medical Director, Children’s Environmental Health Clinic Ontario), Child Life Specialist Deborah Dewbury-Langley, and Research Assistant Meagan Byrne to design accessible, age-appropriate, and culturally sensitive activities. Workshops will invite participants to imagine and animate stories that connect personal experience with the living world—plants, animals, water, and weather systems. Using sustainable materials such as plant-based inks and recycled paper, children will explore themes of care, resilience, and interconnection while developing creative and digital literacy skills.
Participants will directly influence the artistic direction of the project by shaping the stories, characters, and visual worlds within their animations. Each session will encourage improvisation, collaboration, and reflection, centering children’s voices as artists and storytellers. The workshops will be guided by Child Life principles of safety, choice, and emotional support, ensuring that creativity unfolds within a caring, trauma-informed framework.
The project will culminate in a community celebration and screening at the Hyland Cinema in September 2026, where participants’ animations will be shared alongside live music and an Elder-led opening. This celebration will extend the project’s impact beyond hospital walls—honouring children’s creative voices, strengthening community connection, and demonstrating how art can nurture healing, empathy, and ecological care.
A One Health approach is essential to achieving our research objectives. We will be collaborating closely with the Haíɫzaqv Nation and integrating several areas of study, e.g., traditional knowledge, toxicology, ecology, community food security. Members of Haíɫzaqv Nation have been tending and harvesting clams in their territory for millennia, resulting in the community possessing an immense amount of knowledge about the clam populations and the ecosystems they inhabit.
About the Faculty: Dr. Michelle WilsonMichelle Wilson is a queer, neurodivergent artist, mother, and educator whose work centers on community-based programs that integrate the creative arts with health and wellness. Her practice foregrounds artistic collaboration as a form of anti-colonial care, challenging individualistic conceptions of the artist. Instead, she cultivates collective creativity at the margins—bringing together diverse groups through shared acts of making and meaning. Dr. Wilson holds a Ph.D. from the University of Western Ontario and is currently an Assistant Professor cross-appointed in Creative Arts, Health and Wellness, and Visual Arts at the University of Guelph.
About the Student: Meagan Bryne
Meagan (pronounced: Me-Eh-Gan) is an Âpihtawikosisân (Métis of Ontario) interactive digital media artist, game designer, writer, and philosopher. Her most recent work is the Indigenous cybernoir detective game Hill Agency: PURITYdecay.
Beyond digital interactive works Meagan is also known for her philosophical articles on Indigenous digital media such as “Read-Only Sacred Spaces: Indigenous Video Games as Space Safe from Vandalism and Theft” and more recently “What Makes it Indigenous? On Readability and Forced Readability in Indigenous Media”.
Meagan is the co-director of the Indigenous Game Devs collective and the Indigenous Rep for the Canadian Game Studies Association Board. She has served on several boards of interactive media collectives including Dames Making Games, Indigenous Roots, and the Mixed Reality Performance Atelier. Meagan is currently an MFA Studio Arts student at the University of Guelph.