A Creative Bone in My Body

‘I don’t have a creative bone in my body…’

We worry about presenting a ‘finished product’ of anything we do, including ourselves. Moving along, we realize (hopefully) the significance of process – the actual doing. A finished artwork can hold volumes about an experience we want to represent. But the process of making is equally – if not more - revealing of our internal structures.

How are we choosing the materials we’re making with?
Are we hesitant or are we impulsive with our decisions?
What reactions do we have towards our work along the way?
What happens to our emotional state from when we first started to when we finished?

There is meaning in the making.

It Hurts to Be Present

‘It hurts to be present.’ - Marie Howe

Here's the thing..

The self-inquiry process is not always a pretty one.
Questioning our stories is a weighty task. It is no 'happy pill' and nor should we always burden the process, and ourselves, with that expectation.

Not everything we create and communicate will be beautiful, because not everything we experience is beautiful. If anything, I find the art therapy process to be expansive in how it acknowledges our complexities, our nuances, our gaps, our multitudes, and how it holds space for those parts of us to breathe.

With expansiveness and growth, however, comes a grinding of edges and an unsettling of our ideas of who we think we are.
It can happen in the gentle whispers of willow charcoal against the paper, it can happen in the kneading of clay, it can happen in the wide shoulder swings of splashing ink, it can happen in your breathing to endure, it can happen after you've left the room.

The therapeutic process won't dissolve your struggles and challenges. But my hope is that it helps bring language to the mess, the tough, the hurt and the falling apart.

At times, to simply utter our truth can be the start to healing.

Revealing the Internalised

What happens to you when you don’t want to let anyone down?
What happens, when you try to hold it all together?
What happens, when you can’t say ‘No’?

So much about how we internalise certain experiences reveals itself in the process of making. Even more so than the finished product itself.

What choice of material do we go with? What do we leave out?
What physical process do we engage?
Do we shove in? Do we rip apart?
What kind of energy are you feeding into your artwork?
Is the object light? Or does it get heavier as you go?

‘The wire altering its shape to allow room for what’s forced in.
Pieces contorted to fit in.
Parts protruding out.
Testing limits.
The more I pushed in, the more I forgot what were in the inner layers.’