Soul Paint is a multi-award-winning participatory immersive artwork created by Sarah Ticho and Niki Smit, narrated by Rosario Dawson, and developed in collaboration with behavioural scientists, psychologists and wellbeing researchers.

Inside the experience, participants are invited to map their emotional and physical sensations directly onto a virtual representation of their own body using 3D painting tools. Rather than simply naming an emotion, participants locate where that feeling exists physically - in the chest, stomach, shoulders, throat, hands - and transform it into colour, shape, movement and texture.

• Fear may become a tight grey knot held in the chest. 

• Joy might spread as warm gold across the shoulders. 

• Anxiety may appear as static around the head. 

• Grief may move slowly through the limbs like smoke.

Each participant creates a unique emotional self-portrait.

Soul Paint is not only about introspection. Once complete, these artworks become part of a larger shared experience - a living collective landscape built from the emotional realities of hundreds, and eventually thousands, of people.  

Every creative act serves as a mirror, an attempt to anchor the transient nature of emotion. With Soul Paint, we are developing a new kind of reflective space. We invite participants to explore their own lived realities through the medium of the body, externalising hidden landscapes and making them tangible enough to be witnessed, understood, and shared.

The work transforms private sensation into public expression.

It creates a space where audiences are invited not only to reflect on themselves, but to encounter the hidden inner worlds of others.

We scroll. We consume. We watch. We react.

Even many immersive experiences position audiences as observers inside spectacular digital worlds rather than active contributors to them.

Soul Paint takes a different approach.  The participant is not simply inside the artwork. They are the author of it.

Their body, memories, emotions and creative decisions become the material from which the experience is made. The technology exists not to distract from human experience, but to deepen attention towards it.

This shift matters.  As audiences increasingly seek experiences that feel meaningful, embodied and socially connective, immersive art has the potential to move beyond novelty and become a new form of public cultural space - one capable of supporting empathy, reflection and participation at scale.

Soul Paint explores what this future could look like.

We often speak about emotions as abstract concepts, but emotion is profoundly physical.

Stress tightens the jaw and shoulders. Fear accelerates the heartbeat. Grief settles heavily in the chest. Joy can feel expansive and light. Trauma frequently lives in the body long after language fails.

Research across psychology, neuroscience and embodied cognition increasingly recognises that the body is not separate from emotional experience; it is central to how we process and understand ourselves.

Yet most digital communication tools remain overwhelmingly text-based and disembodied.

Soul Paint asks whether immersive art can create new visual languages for human feeling.

By allowing audiences to paint directly onto a virtual body in three-dimensional space, participants begin to externalise experiences that are often difficult to verbalise. The process is playful, creative and accessible, but also surprisingly revealing.

Many participants describe discovering things they did not consciously realise they were carrying. Others describe feeling relief in seeing their internal experiences represented physically for the first time.

The artwork becomes both mirror and conversation.

Soul Paint was not designed as therapy, nor as a clinical intervention - It is an artwork.

But art has always played a vital role in helping people process experience, create meaning and connect with others. Across the UK and internationally, there is growing recognition that cultural participation can support emotional wellbeing, reduce isolation and foster stronger communities.

Creative health is increasingly understood not as an optional cultural add-on, but as an essential part of how healthier societies are built.

Soul Paint sits within this emerging space between immersive art, public participation and emotional wellbeing.

Audience responses gathered during exhibitions and festivals consistently reveal recurring themes:

• increased emotional awareness

• feelings of empathy and connection

• reflection on mind-body relationships

• creative confidence and self-expression

• reduced feelings of isolation

• new conversations around mental health and lived experience

Perhaps most importantly, audiences frequently describe a sense of recognition:
the realisation that other people are carrying invisible emotional worlds too.

In a time marked by loneliness, fragmentation and anxiety, this simple recognition can be powerful.

Item descriptionSoul Paint was conceived not only as a single immersive experience, but as the beginning of a growing collective artwork.

As the project tours to new cities and communities, each participant contributes to an expanding archive of emotional expression - what the artists describe as an “Atlas of Feeling”.

Inside the touring exhibition, audiences encounter projections, digital beings and evolving environments generated from the artworks created by previous participants. The installation becomes a living social space: part gallery, part immersive environment, part emotional commons.

Visitors can observe how people in different places visualise fear, hope, grief, tension, joy or uncertainty. They can compare their own experiences with those of strangers. They can witness emotional diversity represented not through statistics or diagnosis, but through creativity and embodiment.

Each venue and city adds to the growing portrait.

In this way, Soul Paint transforms immersive technology from an isolated headset experience into a shared civic experience.

Across the UK, cultural organisations are increasingly being asked to do more than simply present work.

Venues, museums, festivals and civic partners are exploring how culture can:

• support wellbeing

• engage underserved audiences

• activate public space

• create intergenerational participation

• attract younger audiences

• contribute to local identity

• support regeneration

• build meaningful community connection

Soul Paint aligns strongly with these ambitions because it operates across multiple cultural contexts simultaneously.

It can exist as:

• a gallery installation

• a touring immersive exhibition

• a festival experience

• a public engagement project

• a creative health programme

• a research platform

• a community participation initiative

Importantly, it also creates entry points for audiences who may not traditionally engage with contemporary art or immersive technology. The project’s emotional accessibility allows it to connect across age groups, backgrounds and levels of cultural confidence.

For many participants, the work becomes a first encounter not only with VR, but with creative expression itself.

As immersive technologies become increasingly integrated into everyday life, we face important questions about what kind of digital future we are building.

Will immersive systems further isolate us from one another?

Or can they help create richer forms of empathy, creativity and collective understanding?

Soul Paint argues for a more human-centred vision of immersive culture - one where technology is used not simply for spectacle or consumption, but for reflection, participation and emotional connection.

The project is ultimately less interested in virtual reality as a technology than in what virtual reality makes possible between people.

At its core, Soul Paint is an attempt to make invisible human experiences visible.

To create spaces where audiences can encounter themselves differently.

And to build new forms of collective understanding through creativity, embodiment and play.

In 2027, Soul Paint will tour the UK and internationally through a series of immersive exhibitions, partnerships and public engagement programmes.

The project is currently seeking:

• touring venues

• festival partners

• museums and galleries

• universities and research collaborators

• creative health organisations

• local authority and regeneration partners

• wellbeing and public engagement partners

Each presentation of Soul Paint contributes to a growing collective artwork and public conversation around emotion, embodiment and connection.

Because perhaps one of the most important questions culture can ask right now is also one of the simplest:

Where are you feeling?