Developed by course coordinator Heather Hart and colleagues Fiona Hanley and Bessy Bitzas, an assignment in the graduate course NUR2 608 Seminar in Nursing challenges students to express their understanding of the values at the heart of Strengths-based Nursing and Healthcare (SBNH) through artistic expression. On December 2, 2025, a total of 57 students proudly displayed their artwork at an Art Exhibit that showcased not only their finished products, but also their deeply personal journeys of growth and discovery. “The integration of arts-based teaching strategies into graduate nursing education offers nurses other ways to express themselves and to celebrate the fundamental qualities of self-reflection and imagination,” asserts Professor Hart. We spoke with three students to learn more about their art projects and lessons learned through the creative process.
Folded Within
Rex Wang is a practicing nurse in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit at the Montreal Children’s Hospital of the MUHC, a graduate of the Ingram School of Nursing’s BScN program, and a master’s student in the School’s Advanced Nursing master’s program. Wang admits he was initially skeptical about the arts-based assignment. “I didn’t understand the purpose. But once I decided to use origami to represent the SBNH values that I identify with as a second-generation Canadian of Chinese origin, everything fell into place.”
Titled Folded Within, his art piece features a striking white human silhouette on a black background. The silhouette was fashioned with dozens of pieces of origami which took Wang a total of 24 hours to fold. The black background represents the noise, assumptions, and societal pressures that cause people to hide their real selves as they struggle to fit in while the white origami represents the many layers of identity that we construct for ourselves, as individuals and as patients navigating the healthcare system. In his written reflection accompanying the piece, Wang describes his struggles to fit into society as a visible minority. “Folded Within reflects these inner layers, identity, culture, resilience, and hope that people hold within themselves, even when unseen.”
Refracted Narrative
“I really loved doing this art assignment,” reports Chloe Alice Karam, a student in the Global Health concentration of the Advanced Nursing master’s program and a nurse at the Children’s. Karam created a dramatic lamp made of textured, coloured stained glass with an eye at its centre. The painstaking yet gratifying artistic process involved choosing and cutting different sized glass pieces, covering each piece with copper, joining the pieces together with burnt lead and then oxidizing the finished product. She considers herself fortunate to have benefited from the guidance of her mother, whose expertise working with this challenging medium was invaluable.
Titled Refracted Narrative, the lamp took five weekends to complete. Concerned about the health of our planet, Karam consciously chose colours found in the natural world - yellow and blue symbolizing the sun and the sky, green, brown, and earth tones symbolizing vegetation, earth, and rocky landscapes.
“Together, these elements emphasize the inseparable relationship between people and their environment,” she notes. Furthermore, the way each piece of glass joins together to form a unified whole reflects the SBNH values of holism and embodiment, while the light shining through the glass represents the diversity of human perspectives, meanings and subjective realities.
Something for Everything
A master’s student in the Adult Care Nurse Practitioner Program, Noelle Leon-Palmer never considered herself artistic. “I went into full-blown panic mode when I got the assignment,” she laughs. Eventually, she hit upon the idea of putting together an attractive and inspirational cookbook that combines Western medicine with her Jamaican roots. “Jamaican food carries stories of healing, lineage and resilience, which appealed to my identity as a healer,” she explains.
As an added bonus this arts-based assignment provided Leon-Palmer with an opportunity to spend more time with her mother. The pair got together frequently, experimenting with and testing the recipes before selecting the ones that made it into the cookbook. Illustrated with photos and drawings, each recipe is accompanied by a vignette describing its origins and healing properties. Leon-Palmer surprised herself by illustrating or capturing all of the images and photos.
In her written reflection describing her project, Leon-Palmer focused on the concept of Two-Eyed Seeing, a framework that pairs Indigenous and Western ways of knowing side-by-side. “This resonated with me as a Black nurse working within a healthcare system that often values biomedical knowledge over cultural or holistic understanding of wellness…Ultimately, this work is about reclaiming holism within a profession that often fragments the self.”
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