Current Projects
Exploring how creative practice can support community connection, ecological wellbeing, and inner awareness through relational arts practice. This includes community-based projects, collaborative storytelling, and accessible creative experiences that invite participation, reflection, and connection with self and place.
The Root That Remained:
Futurecasting | Zine Project
This illustrated zine began with a question: what kind of world becomes possible when creativity is treated as essential to human life instead of secondary to productivity?
This project is part of an ongoing body of work exploring creativity, community wellbeing, and the relationship between artistic practice and social change. A future expanded version is planned as an interactive coloring book.
All illustrations and narration are original works by Zena Bardelas. The project is intended as the beginning of a larger evolving series, including a future coloring book adaptation.
Research consistently shows that participation in creative practice strengthens social connection, belonging, and wellbeing, yet rural realities remain deeply underrepresented in existing research and funding models. This interdisciplinary video project explores what happens when rural communities lose access to institutional support and how creative practice often becomes part of the informal infrastructure people build in response.
Drawing from research in arts and health, community development, public health, and cultural policy, the project examines the relationship between creativity, resilience, and community care through both academic research and lived experience in Humboldt County, California. Combining narration, visual storytelling, and original editing, the piece reflects on the closure of community arts spaces, the erosion of rural resources, and the role creative practice can play in sustaining connection, meaning, and collective wellbeing.
Rather than treating art as secondary to economic or social survival, this project asks what becomes possible when creativity is understood as part of the connective tissue that allows communities to remain rooted, adaptive, and alive.
Creative Practice as the Foundation for Resilience:
Interdisciplinary Inquiry:
When Institutions Abandon Rural Communities
What It Learns:
Human/Machine Study
This 8×10 acrylic study on board is part of a broader series developed during my painting class, where I was exploring emerging relationships between humans, machines, and artificial intelligence. Working quickly at a study scale allowed me to focus less on resolution and more on the emotional logic of the scene.
Within this series, I was also thinking about presence and responsibility in human–computer systems, and where the “adults” are located in these evolving relationships. The work sits in that unsettled space between tenderness and uncertainty, where connection is being newly negotiated.
Belonging Takes Slowness:
I drew a question on the ground and waited to see if anyone would answer
This zine documents a small public art experiment conducted in the Rosewood neighborhood of Eureka, California. Using sidewalk chalk, open-ended questions, and temporary public prompts, the project explored what happens when moments of curiosity and play interrupt spaces primarily designed for speed, isolation, and transit.
Combining written reflection, observational field notes, and participatory interaction, the work traces how small creative gestures can invite conversation, recognition, and unexpected forms of connection between neighbors. What began as a simple act of writing on a sidewalk gradually became an unfolding exchange shaped by strangers, passersby, and the surrounding neighborhood itself.
All writing, photography, design, and facilitation were created by Zena Bardelas.
Bridging Generations:
Community Heallth Proposal Program Design
This project is a community health proposal exploring how creative practice can be used to address loneliness, strengthen belonging, and support wellbeing across generations. Developed through research in public health, community development, arts engagement, and social connection, the proposal centers creativity not as enrichment alone, but as an accessible tool for relationship-building, emotional expression, and community resilience.
Developed by Zena Bardelas as part of Community Health Promotion coursework at Cal Poly Humboldt.
Finding Ground:
Nature Walk & Painted Stone Project
This project was created for a 12 year old who loves art and athletics, and struggles with anxiety, especially before bedtime and around sleep. The activity combines a nature walk with the creation of a painted comfort stone – something tangible they can hold when their mind races at night.
The intent of this project is to offer a supportive creative practice that honors their self-direction and existing interests. For this person, the nature walk is key: movement supports both focus and regulation. The painted stone becomes a touchstone to that regulation – something tangible to hold when anxiety arrives.