art, and therapy, and the space between

Before training in Art Therapy I worked as a volunteer Arts Worker with a L’Arche Community, part of the international residential network for people with Learning or Intellectual Disabilities. I was there for just one afternoon session each week. Residents had access to a well stocked workshop engaging in any number of arts activities, including the making of candles that were sold in the shop front. It was an alive, cheerful and welcoming space just one street back from the beach.

I remember staff expressing an expectation that I arrive each week with an organised activity to pull out of the ‘magic bag’; craft and art projects that would occupy everyone for an afternoon. Not only did this raise anxiety in me, it seemed to raise anxiety in the residents.

‘Core members’, as residents were known, seemed happy to work at their chosen activity; painting, weaving, sculpting, mostly individually in the shared space. Rather than introduce new group activities I spent a short time sitting with each person, watching, observing and talking about what they were doing, sometimes suggesting ways in which they might try working differently. I remember one who painted straight lines with staccato brush strokes, many repetitive lines over and over. We tried the brush in more flowing movements, circular motions, loosening up their posture into wide sweeps of their arm. There were smiles. It was an intimate space of quiet activity, only broken when someone struggling to communicate might become more loud or violent, and even then core members would gather round and calm their friend, showing incredible care for one another.

Unwittingly I had facilitated what I would know in the future as a ‘Studio Art Therapy’ session, still one of the most powerful and underrated ways of working.

Apparently over weeks the mood of some core members notably improved. I don’t remember looking for outcomes, I was just looking for justification to not do organised activities each week.

It was a powerfully responsive and healing space. In training as an Art Therapist I sense that I took this process of looking and ‘being present’ and distilled it into a more concentrated version. Through the alchemy that is psychodynamics, my own psychotherapy and three volumes of ‘Attachment and Loss’ I seem to have gained a greater awareness of myself and how in a space I might use my distilled version of 'being present’ to bring a measure of psychological healing for trauma and distress.

I sense no wide space between Art Therapy and Arts Workers. I am still an artist, but I now have a qualification that brings with it a state registration, a level of governance and accountability to the public for my clinical work; but am I more effective?

A few years ago I worked with the National Health Service in Scotland in establishing a Head of Arts Therapies post in one area board. As a solution to the lack of Health Service funds we worked with an external Health Foundation in establishing a post that is both an Arts Therapies leader managing a clinical arts therapies service, and a strategic leader who will take a governance oversight of Arts in Wellbeing strategy across the region, encompassing Arts Therapies and Arts programmes alike.

I sense that good therapists have always been able to work with the grey areas; the space between art and therapy, yet over the years of my development as a thearpist I have often felt anxious that my clinical work does not appear to others as ‘just art’, and that somehow I need to use long psychological language to differentiate myself. There are a multitude of insecurities here that we all cross, and it has taken me many years to understand that my presence as a therapist exists regardless of the format I use. I sense it matters little to a client what I call myself, but that I am present to them. In a Health Service rightly questioning it’s funding of all treatments I sense that Arts Therapists would do well to show that we can collaborate at the edges of our profession, as well as stand in the knowledge of our own professional dynamic presence, and our consequential clinical outcomes.

I sit with a client, unwilling or unable to speak or show their face. They communicate with their hand; movements made like a puppet without eyes. Intimacies open up, connection is made and a journey of healing marks itself before us. Are we ready? we ask, and we both walk on.

Collaboration and understanding even after years of training remains the simplest and most beautiful thing.