The Concussion Center at the University of Michigan School of Kinesiology is using visual art to capture the experiences of concussion patients.

Ypsilanti, Michigan-based artist Avery Williamson, along with a team of students from the U-M Stamps School of Art & Design, recently completed an expansive mural at the center after interviewing patients and visualizing their road to recovery from concussion.

The finished work grew from a desire by Steve Broglio, director of the Concussion Center, who had been thinking about incorporating art into the center’s public space as a nontraditional way to express the medical process.

“As a scientist, I can put a number to a lot of things, but that doesn’t put emotion behind what the experience of a concussion is like,” he said.

He approached the U-M Arts Initiative regarding their Arts Initiative Project Support program, which provides grant funding for select projects that increase arts access across campus, and was approved.

“When I saw the funding was available for this type of work, it just seemed like a really good opportunity to make this thing happen that I had been thinking about for so long,” Broglio said.

Jenny Carty, curator of public art for the U-M Museum of Art and the Arts Initiative, agreed that art in social spaces—particularly when the work speaks to the sciences— opens opportunities to see the world in a different light. After initial conversations with Broglio and securing the funds, Carty set about finding an artist with a unique set of skills.

She found “the perfect fit” in Williamson.

“We needed someone who could capture such a complex issue of, not only how you visualize the experience of a concussion, but could engage with patients who are recovering from concussions, and capture that emotional, resonant response on to a wall,” Carty said. “(Williamson’s) work is so deeply emotional and has all these wonderful qualities that speak to the way art can showcase different levels of humanity.”

Williamson had never experienced a concussion, herself, so she started thinking about how to form some sort of “shared language,” or element of co-creation between herself as interviewer and the patients as interviewees. She identified an important aspect of her visual art practice that overlapped with the task of capturing a person’s complex emotional response to a traumatic event.

“I did a survey of my drawings and isolated the marks that I use over and over again,” she said. “I started journaling as I drew so that I could be more conscious about the emotions I was associating with these marks. In my abstract pieces, I think about holding emotional complexity or competing ideas, or feelings or reactions, that I don’t really have a good verbal way to express, so they come out in the art making as a type of language and release.”

Armed with a full deck of Pantone colors—what Williamson describes as “a universal color language for artists and designers”—and a collection of her design patterns and marks, the artist-interviewer got to work.

She asked patients which design patterns most resonated with different stages of their recovery. She had them identify colors they associated with their concussion journey and asked questions about how their communication styles and abilities may have changed while recovering. Each prompt deepened the conversations.

For Williamson, different marks represented panic or frustration, haziness, heaviness, darkness or peace, improvement, and gaining clarity.

She found a large group of interviewees reacted similarly to certain dots and dashes representative of their recovery.

“I think people really responded to what they observed as the expressive, urgent, in-motion nature of their recovery, where a lot of things were happening at once,” she said.

When it came to color, some responses were very literal. Bright light can be painful for those recovering from concussion, so some patients went straight to the yellow cards in the Pantone deck to signify brightness.

Others were more emotional and introspective, hovering in the deep blue and purple sections, representing the mood they felt, or the way their concussion affected their optimism or belief in resiliency.

Williamson worked to incorporate an element from every interviewee’s color and pattern selections into the final piece.

“Having Avery’s work in the center makes it very relatable,” Carty said. “It allows you to really envision the medical process and the body experience, but also makes you think about how the arts can really activate certain spaces that you might otherwise just pass by.”

Williamson hopes the patients she spoke with feel heard when they see the final work, and that it might influence others in the space to become more educated about concussions and how to support those who are recovering from a concussion.