Immersion

Immersion Is… Combining passion with academics to engage in truly immersive creative expression experiences. Immersion Vanderbilt provides students the opportunity to have their creative expression immersive experiences and projects recognized on their transcripts. Students who are engaged in the artistic process can transform ideas into action, refine skills, and integrate knowledge with experience. All students majoring in art create a thesis exhibition in their senior year that counts towards their Immersion experience.

Immersion Stories

Micayla Cochran, BA’22

Major: Ecology, Evolution, and Organismal Biology; Spanish

Venue: Student Gallery, E. Bronson Ingram Studio Arts Center

Mentor: Vesna Pavlović, Professor of Art

Micayla’s project, titled Hidden Worlds, invited viewers to think creatively about what can lie beyond what is clearly visible. The series highlighted the diversity of wildlife that lives in the natural areas around the Tennessee cities of Memphis and Nashville. The works complemented her Honors thesis where she used trail cameras to study the activity patterns of different mammals. The larger prints are a combination of landscape shots and drawn outlines of the species that can be found in those specific habitats. The smaller prints document the artist’s research process and provided examples of the photos that are captured by the trail cameras.

Micayla’s Immersion project combined her passion for nature photography with the lab work that she conducted within the Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences. The installation was the culmination of work that took place over two and a half years.