Anna van Suchtelen

Anna van Suchtelen and Michèle Gerbrands, Creativity & Science workshops, I Art My Science – Mysteries in Science, Utrecht University, 2024

For the third edition of I Art My Science, Michèle Gerbrands and I created and moderated two workshops for applicants of IAMS Open Call 2025, co-hosted by Tania Morán Luengo and Lisa Keijzer. Inspired by this year’s theme Mysteries in Science, participating scientists developed – with knowledge of the key principles of creative thinking and with the help of creative writing and brainstorming exercises – a narrative/artist statement that will serve as the foundation for an art piece.

Anna van Suchtelen and Marc van Mil, Creativity & Science workshop, TULIPS Postdoc Curriculum, Amelisweerd, 2024

For TULIPS Postdoc Curriculum, Marc van Mil and I organized a Creativity & Science workshop in the forest of Amelisweerd. Inspired by the 18th century Chinese wallpaper in historic mansion Oud-Amelisweerd, students entered the surrounding woodland as 18th century explorers, collecting conference data on rituals and healing in the far east.

Anna van Suchtelen and Marc van Mil, Creativity & Science workshop, Eureka Translational Medicine Summer School, Utrecht University, UU Botanical Gardens, 2024

At Eureka’s Summer School, Marc van Mil and I organized a Creativity & Science workshop in the Botanical Gardens. After a research period of exploration in the medical garden section, science students translated group narratives into six movie scenarios, each featuring a human organ and its medical plants.

5 Cocktails, riso print, commissioned by Utrecht University & Eureka Institute for Translational Medicine, printed at Grafisch Atelier Den Bosch, February and June 2023, launched at Eureka’s Summer School, July 2023

Twenty five medical students enter a botanical garden: a teaching garden that houses plants used to treat diseases. The students are divided into five groups. Each group represents a human organ: lung, brain, bladder, intestines, and eyes.

The five groups head for their own section of the medical garden. The lungs tenderly touch the fennel leaves, they sniff the thyme. The brains crush lavender leaves between their fingers while inhaling lemon balm. The intestines face sharpness and freshness, color as well, with red rhubarb stalks and bright green peppermint. And the eyes, they stare at the yellow and blue of chamomile and blueberries, their mouth corners turn purple from berry juice. More berries, for the bladders. Cranberries. They better watch out, before the nettle stings them.

They smell and listen. They look, they draw, and they write, the five organs, the botanists. With their senses wide open, they start to feel. They transform the living organism into a plant on paper. Into a story, a dialogue. Alchemists as they are, they search for further transformation. The five organs collect their belongings and head for their goal. Off they go, the pharmacists, armed with five recipes. The five organs are not done yet. They sniff, they taste, they touch. They add, they remove. They shake, shake, shake, the scientists, the bartenders. They expand, and shrink, and expand again, through the full use of their five senses they start to understand. The plant essences are released into the spirits. Five cocktails. Five recipes for life.

5 Cocktails is a two-sided risograph printed in an edition of 80, signed and numbered by the artists Brian Goeltzenleuchter and Anna van Suchtelen. The print was made at Grafisch Atelier Den Bosch in June 2023. The print documents some outcomes of the socially engaged artwork of the same title, which was launched at Utrecht University Botanical Gardens on 7 July 2022. The project was commissioned by Utrecht University & Eureka Institute for Translational Medicine. Photographs courtesy of Erik Kottier.

Anna van Suchtelen and Brian Goeltzenleuchter, Creativity & Science workshop, Eureka Translational Medicine Summer School, Utrecht University, UU Botanical Gardens, 2023

At Eureka’s Summer School, Brian Goeltzenleuchter and I organized for the second time a Creativity & Science workshop in the Botanical Gardens. After a research period of exploration in the medical garden section, science students translated group narratives into recipes and five cocktails were created, with the use of herbs and plants specific for each human organ.

Creativity within Eureka Translational Medicine: Anna van Suchtelen and Brian Goeltzenleuchter are internationally respected artists who have a long history of collaboration. Their Eureka workshop Creativity and Science highlights the false dilemma of considering art and science as binary opposites. Focusing instead on the commonality of creativity, the artists produced curriculum for science innovators who strive to come to terms with the uncertainty that comes with working collaboratively and across disciplinary borders.

The core theme of the workshop is that creativity is not a talent that one either has or does not have: rather, it is a tool that can be activated and deactivated. Through participating in hand-on and often laughter-inducing group activities, students learn when, why, and how creativity can be deployed in their professional lives.

Anna van Suchtelen and Brian Goeltzenleuchter, Creativity & Science workshop, Eureka Translational Medicine Summer School, Utrecht University Botanical Gardens, 2022

Twenty-five medical students enter a botanical garden, located on the campus of Utrecht University: this teaching garden houses a variety of plants used to treat disease. The students are divided into five groups. Each group is tasked with studying plants that have been used to treat a human organ: eye, lung, brain, bladder, and intestines. The five groups head to their own section of the medical garden. They are asked to study a pair of plants: the eye-group studies chamomile and blueberry, the lung-group fennel and thyme, the brain-group lemon balm and lavender, the bladder-group stinging nettle and cranberry, the intestine-group rhubarb and peppermint. The students look and draw, smell and taste, talk and listen. With all their senses focused, they are charged with writing a story in which the organ and the plants come to life and carry on a conversation. Next, the students enter a classroom. The very plants they studied in the garden are now arranged on a bar table alongside cocktail shakers, muddlers, strainers, sugars and spirits: the classroom has been transformed into a bartending academy. The final task is to transform their story into a signature cocktail (or a mocktail), which will be presented alongside a reading of their short stories and their recipes. Upon entering the classroom, the students are led down a shapeshifting rabbit hole. They descend as future physicians looking to understand the pharmacological efficacy of plants, they exit the hole as alchemists distilling the essence of the same plants into alcoholic elixirs.

an interior monologue

A science-art collaboration between Anna van Suchtelen, Brian Goeltzenleuchter and Jurjen Luykx, video, 4 min, 2020

In this short video narrative, the neuroscientist/psychiatrist Luykx and artists Van Suchtelen and Goeltzenleuchter illustrate their take on the interplay between neurobiologically driven behavior and free will. The video is in ‘false’ slow motion: it takes them 4 minutes to visualize brain actions that take place in fractions of seconds. A person on a busy street corner notices another person wearing an odd hat. Person 1 – whose interior monologue we follow – makes eye contact with person 2, who approaches close enough for person 1 to smell him or her. Person 1 considers engaging further but ultimately decides to walk on.

Is free will an illusion? The action potential is where neuroscience meets both art and philosophy. The action potential relates to firing of neurons that drives human behavior. But where does free will come into play? Is it free will that guides neurobiological processes and thus ultimately results in ‘free behavior’. Or is it neurobiology acting by itself and preventing any form of free will to guide us through life?

The collaborators believe that art, philosophy and neuroscience can cross-pollinate and deepen our understanding of human decision making. Funny hat is a project that aims to visualize a selected set of cognitive processes – ranging from judgment to planning and processing of external sensory input – in a way that brings the fields of neuroscience, philosophy and art together.

Anna van Suchtelen and Brian Goeltzenleuchter, Eureka Summer School, 2018

more on translational creativity

Anna van Suchtelen and Brian Goeltzenleuchter, Eureka Institute, 2014-present

With their workshop series on translational creativity, Anna van Suchtelen and Brian Goeltzenleuchter create an environment in which participants can indulge in creative tasks, shifting between the comical, the philosophical, and the therapeutic. Ultimately, it is a celebration of the transcendent nature of creativity in our daily lives. The series of workshops is part of a project, based on the video When to Throw a Painting to a Drowning Man.

more on translational creativity workshops

Anna van Suchtelen and Brian Goeltzenleuchter, 2012

When to Throw a Painting to a Drowning Man is an artist-made self-help video that shows how creativity can be useful to anyone. The video offers parables and exercises that evoke the structure of a self-help book. It celebrates the transcendent nature of creativity, examining its potential as a skill and tool for problem solving, critical thinking, networking, and team building.

Anna van Suchtelen and Brian Goeltzenleuchter

Paintings for Drowning Men Artists’ folio, 2015

Paintings for Drowning Men Artists’ multiple, 2014 

check out Drowning Men complete series

The value of creativity for enhancing translational ecologies, insights, and discoveries

opinion article for The Silent Cry/Translational Medicine, Brian Goeltzenleuchter, Anna van Suchtelen, Kelly L. Brown and Gianfranco Grompone, Frontiers in Psychology, 2019