This collective exhibition reflects explorations based upon ongoing, open-ended visual explorations and personal artmaking. Graduate students in the Master of Arts (MA) in Clinical Mental Health Counseling: Art Therapy program met weekly during Spring 2022 to visually explore and create personal artwork in the Art Therapy Studio course. In this unique class, students dove deeply into aspects of self and identity. Process and product are central components of art therapy. Through different experiences, students came to understand the scope and depth of their creative processes and acknowledge the mystery of engagement. Witnessing in art therapy is a unique practice that embraces the known and the unknown. Students learn to "hold space" for self and others while being simultaneously guided by silent reflective observations. Not knowing is difficult to tolerate, however, risk-taking in art therapy parallels the therapeutic process and holds the key to self-understanding regardless of discomfort or uncertainty.
The process of art-making underscores how the art of emerging art therapists holds the potential for transformation: confused and uncertain, explore, process, discover, play, and witnessing the intersectionality of connectivity. While transformation is often simply referred to as an outward change, metamorphosis is a process of transformation based on the challenges of change. For art therapists, this includes the integration of self-understanding and identity through visual processing and risk-taking, witnessing deep artistic states, and embracing discovery steeped in inner dialogues of self-understanding.
We invite you to scroll through this virtual exhibition Transfigure, Transform, Transmute: Inner and Outer Change, and to view the artwork of graduate students created alongside course instructors Denise Malis and Raquel Stephenson.