Student Project Grants: Spellbreaker

Photo courtesy of Brynn McGregor

Jacklyn Brickman, a 2017 Student Project Grants recipient, has been creating works of art for years. Her most recent project which is still a work in progress, Spellbreaker, aims to "honor and bridge the gap between folk culture and technology by highlighting the process of making black walnut ink and emphasizing the connections our human bodies have to those in nature."

She was recently able to present a version of it at the Fergus Family Scholarship at The Ohio State University and recapped the event with this video. She has also presented at the Hayes Graduate and Research Forum and in Washington, DC at The National Academy of Sciences Role/Play: Collaborative Creativity and Creative Collaborations Student Fellows Symposium.

She describes, "The Black Walnut Tree, an Ohio native, is among the most efficient carbon absorbing trees. It is known in folk and herb culture to be a spellbreaker of heredity and the environment. The nut is a physical reference to the signature of the human head (the shell) and the brain (the nut within)."

As her project advances and with funding from Tech Hub, the CO2 sensor will activate the drip release based on human breath or other CO2 detected in the immediate air, such as car exhaust.