Students Bring Folklore’s Magical Creatures to Life

Students in Jeannie Thomas’s English 3700: Regional Folklore course had the opportunity to create visual interpretations of a magical creature for a specific purpose and audience. Their projects ranged from griffins and werewolves to a Percy Jackson-inspired Chimera on a roller coaster to a hand-drawn Golden Retriever Ahuizotl.

The class has been looking at magical creatures from historic folk tradition to see what they can reveal about different places and cultures. Jeannie reflects, “The photographer we looked at, Benjamin Von Wong, created surreal photos of mermaids and thousands of used plastic bottles for a specific purpose. He wanted to ‘get people to talk about something that is ordinary, ugly, and boring,’ i.e., the number of plastic bottles in the ocean right now.”

To apply class concepts, the students worked on their visual interpretation and identified the purpose behind their work, what message it conveyed, and where it should be placed.

Jeannie says she and the class had a lot of fun with the project: “We enjoyed the creativity and the visual images they created in various media ranging from AI to hand drawings. We laughed at the AI goofs or tells, like the Chimera roller coaster. We also liked the variety of purposes that they came up with for their projects: from humorous (scaring kids with a werewolf to get them to go to bed) to healing (a phoenix sculpture for fire-ravaged areas).”