Intersections: Where Growth Meets Process, Choice, and Discovery

In the processes of creating during my time in the Art Therapy program, I learned a great deal about what it means to hold art therapist as an identity. It has also been my intention to continuously explore different types of media (2D, 3D, different sizes, colors, and textures) in relation to various ideas that came up for me during studio time.

By allowing the process and feeling towards the work to guide its aesthetic qualities, my artwork serves as a blatant display of internal choice-making, expression, and reflection on my assimilation to the identity of an art therapist. It is also my intention that my artwork shows a portrayal of growth and processing rather than a concrete story of relational aesthetics. The creation itself of each piece alone weighs heavier than the final products you now see. Displaying my work serves as a glimpse into a student experience, and what that exploration can look like when artist identities merge with a new therapist identity.

The three pieces I chose for this exhibit embody risk-taking, empowerment, and truth, respectively. Using the studio time and artmaking materials I have on hand, I trust myself to explore, try new mediums, and develop a new love for old skills.

In my first 3D form (Beauty Within), I used a paper bag to push myself to use recycled materials. This process returns me to a familiar place where my love for art began when I was younger. I didn't have art-quality materials at this age. I was happy to create something for myself. The risk-taking encourages me to step closer to witness the inner beauty of the piece instead of judging on the outer appearance.

My second piece (Stand Together) uses artmaking as a voice and platform to spread awareness of racial injustice to the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community. Initially, this piece was my response to the devastating hate crimes. Now, I see it becoming an identity I can't separate from my art therapist self. Art-making might not heal the community or me, but it was the first step to becoming an advocate for my clients.

For my last piece (Depth), I represent all my self-growth and learning into one self-portrait. Taking the new discoveries and care (for self, process, and clients) to store for the future to come. It represents my love for using found objects and the transformative aspect of these objects and artmaking for wellbeing. 

In my artwork, I like to experiment with the contrast between fully black and white and fully colored imagery.  In my more recent work, I have played with colors more frequently with variations in medium, texture, transparency, and narrative.  Each piece tells its own story but also feels like snippets of my own life’s experiences and perceptions. 

In these three works, rectangular and square shapes dominate the common theme—sometimes the focal point and other times the background—representing both the structure and lack thereof in my art and day-to-day life.  With both eyes and window-like shapes in my images, there is an underlying them of observation, being watched (scrutiny), and personal reflection.  

My artwork is my internal representation of my conscious and unconscious being. It is my voice where I share my feelings and thoughts. It is my fingerprint and like a fingerprint I am unique. When I create, I feel the peace and freedom inside to explore and communicate. My work is a dialogue, an invitation to communicate with others. It is the beginning of a relationship that holds the power to inspire others to create and explore themselves.  

In my art pieces, I decided to focus on the different faces that I have identified as important in discovering and reflecting on my identity. It reflects the dark parts and experiences as an individual in my life—the joy, strengths, experiences, and emotions in my life. 

It also reflects my worldview perspective and how others see me as an individual, family, friend, and acquaintance. I found my body and mind fully invested in this art piece, as I let myself be transported and think about my own self-identity. What made me? Who made me? What experiences made me? I also really found myself invested and embedded in the flow and process of what the exploration of my own identity meant for me during this whole course. In all three of these art pieces, I decided to make different trees that represent my inner cores. 

Poetry to Art Piece

Who are you? I am you and everyone else, I am in you and everyone else. I am in the core of you, I am your growth, your knowledge, your sadness, your happiness, your experiences, I am you in your failures, I am you in your achievements. Just as a tree grows slowly but surely, your inner tree grows, and as it grows your roots get stronger. Just like within every season of a tree your experiences change into a new chapter changing life. Adding. Subtracting. The puzzle to your in-core tree is always there. But the root of the inner core tree is within yourself and everyone else will always be the core of your identity. 

I have always felt that creativity was crucial to a sense of meaningful life, but there has been fear, hesitation, and doubt about whether I could create or if it would be good enough. Over the past 10 years, my work has been 3D and focused on clay.

In this class, I have been exploring 2D and also delving into this creative wound. Through the process, I have received a great deal of help from my budding art therapist identity. I have learned that a precious life-giving journey occurs when I switch from judgment of product to full engagement in the process. I learned that I can create, and wherever there is a lack, it is just a matter of skill, which is something attainable.

I also learned more about trusting the process. The two art-therapist works show this dialogue. In Care for the Hurt Self, my artist holds the part of me with the creative wound and my art therapist and therapist identities support both my artist and hurt self. Through this kind of artistic dialogue, I can draw from all my inner parts and become a resource for myself. 

These three pieces are an edited collection of an exploration that has spanned all semester. Working with the idea of scale, I have been examining my identity this semester. In these images, I have depicted the life of my internal world (Cognitions, Zoomed In), a bird’s-eye view of me in my community (Tree of Life), as well as a visualization of my future identity as an art therapist (The Process Realized). 

So many questions are bound to arrive in diving into this self-reflective state. I believe that art-making is a way of documenting and aiming to answer these questions. What does my identity say today? Where will it go tomorrow? The process leads the way. 

I explore kinetic mark-making through vibrant color choices and tactful compositions. Sometimes I enjoy building layers of media. Materials sandwiched throughout the process—collage, pencil, and layers of paint—are used with preference.

Other times I fall into the magic of engaging in just one media. Watercolors gliding across the textured paper, saturating an otherwise blank canvas. Both approaches to media are welcome here. Bright, varied colors are the true guideposts for my making, revealing the emotions that ruminate inside.  

Within these works, I reconnected and restored my identity as an artist. At the beginning of the semester, I lacked a certain openness to take risks from my typical aesthetic perception. I found this resistance prominently affected my creative repertoire, causing me to overwhelm my pieces with movement, materials, and ideas.  

My first piece represents the moment of growth where I began to shift my perception—a transition from resistance to a reduction of soft loops.  

Dialoguing with my images to give voice to my parts caused my body to feel lighter and my mind more organized. The beans depicted in my second piece acted as containers for my present emotions. They hold my parts and huddle together to communicate the ebb and flow of my process fluctuating between clarity to confusion to ultimately find resolution.  

This dialoguing led me to resolve the origin of my resistance. I used tempera paint in my final piece to reflect my emotional inside on my physical outside to heal the hurt that obstructed my creative identity. When I severed a nerve in my left hand leaving my ring and pinky fingers feeling completely numb, I lost my ability to create as I had previously done. The blue in this piece reflects not only the numbness I feel but also the sadness I hold for this loss. Through the process of surgery and rehabilitation, I gained awareness around the conjecture I held for the privilege I hold from being able-bodied. By dialoguing the shame and fear for holding this conjecture, I was able to redefine my creative process with my new hands and become more attuned to my artistic process.        

I picked three different artworks that I believe stood out to me throughout the class. I used a variety of materials from collage to watercolor and pen and ink. These pieces are different in their materials, and theme. The fact that they are so different from one another is what brings them together. Texture and space are things that also stand out to me within each of these works. Space is something that has been brought to my attention and is something I think about looking back at my pieces. Each of these pieces shows a lot of overlap as well. 

Over the past few months, I have explored several avenues of myself and my understanding of art therapy in the studio. This piece stands as a summation of my explorations and reflects the biggest lessons I learned. A key component of this piece is the multimedia approach I took toward its creation. A single page can stand as a boundary and a limitation. While it provides safety and stability, I find it limits my personal exploration and provides me with an excuse to stop too early.

Breaking out from the page onto multiple pages or into 3D media provides me with my biggest breakthroughs. I formed this piece using some of my favorite media and pulling visual elements from my most successful pieces of the semester. Black thread outlines a figural representation of my body, and color and pattern fill the space behind it. They are the frame of my life and myself. The thread is pulled from a piece on dreams, and this piece builds the dream of my future. The colors are pulled from imagery made about my childhood and represent my past experiences.

Finally, the patterning reflects a piece exploring the harder topics we as people and art therapists must face and represent a moment where I pushed myself past my comfort zone. In all this piece holds for me these experiences, plans, and explorations as I move forward in my artistic and therapeutic journey. 

Art is a powerful way to express oneself nonverbally. For me, it has always been an outlet in which I have turned to when I need a sense of stability and strength. This piece I originally made representing my therapist identity but is more than that. It is representative of myself as an artist, therapist, art therapist, and overall as a human being.

Expanding and stretching myself to meet others where they are at and being part of a support system and an advocate for those around me— whether that be friends, family, or clients—is something I try to continuously be conscious of and put in the work to make a positive difference for others. This piece is about adapting oneself while remaining true to my own intersecting identity meeting the needs of those around me.

The interactive element of how the movement of the paper speaks to that sense of adaptability. Hands are symbolic as a sense of inclusion from my perspective, as they can be a tool to communicate nonverbally, similarly to how art can be a way of communicating. The paper breathes as the hands reach out and come back together as the paper expands and collapses back into itself allowing reflection both externally and internally as I can view the piece from the outside looking in and the internal work throughout the process.  

It has not been easy to create art throughout the past pandemic year since stimulus and motivation that allow my creativity to work out have been limited. But it was definitely meaningful in that I—a lot of times—had to self-reflect and see my vulnerabilities—which were uncomfortable—but I became less uncomfortable with them.

Through art-making time, I gradually developed my unique way of expressing my identity. These three pieces represent how I explored my identity and what I discovered. These three pieces speak of inherent power, potential, resilience, validation, and self-acceptance.

I have honed and just took a step forward to a journey of being an art therapist with a strong artist identity. I look forward to seeing myself in a new studio, continuing to explore and cultivate myself.

The pieces that I have chosen to show resemble my personal process of “becoming”.

This process has been slightly awkward, and at times uncomfortable, but most of all, enlightening. This semester has felt like the process of waking up and that is what is reflected in each brushstroke, layer, structure, and color I have made. I have experimented with new materials, trying to get in touch with a genuine piece of myself that is only developing.

I have refined my old skills, drawing knowledge that has become a part of my personal philosophy. And I have also been able to have fun with my work, to be encapsulated within it, forgetting about the rest of the world. Each week, this studio class has been a therapeutic place for respite. Despite being enveloped in the challenging and new world of graduate school, this has been a reminder that rest and introspection are mandatory for growth.

I have been able to explore, reflect, and expand on my sense of self. This process is not always perfect, or beautiful, but it is paramount as we grow towards our goals.  

This body of work represents a culmination of growth through a series of experientials. Overlapping elements and playing around with the metaphor of a frame has been a recurring theme in my most recent work.

I felt called to continue to create using found materials and allow my environment to inform my work. This triptych was created with a layering collage technique, building on apiece created prompted by defining personal identity. These three pieces embody the playful and exploratory capacity of art.

Many photos I used were taken over the past few months and have become a form of photographic journaling of my personal growth. My camera roll has become an important placeholder in my life of memories and ideas. Similar to a physical journal, I can scroll through my photo album and quickly get a glimpse of each chapter of my journey.

With these three pieces, I wanted to prompt the viewer to be able to separate elements, themes, and figures. Each layer could be peeled back to reveal another, and each element could be picked up and reconfigured. My relationship with art-making and dialoguing with my work has been completely transformed throughout this course. I was able to find connections between my inner and outer world and redefine my identity as an artist and a therapist.

My subject matter on this final art piece in the Studio Art course focuses on the three aspects of my art professional identity. My identity centers on my core being as an artist. No matter where I am in my life journey, I have an artistic focus, interest, and approach through my materials and aesthetic sensibility.

My first decorated head symbolizes this, with a variety of colors, textures, and having no lens.

My second head symbolizes my identity in counseling. My approach is professional, creating trust and safety in my environment with boundaries as I listen and help those that are in need of mental health services. There is a new lens I have acquired to help me with this identity.

My third piece is on blending the two together as an art therapist. With empathetic listening and witnessing others in their creativity, I provide a resource for healing. It is in this piece I also use a different combined lens that requires me to be fluid, to adapt, and to continue my self-awareness to be effective with others. 

As an art therapist, I will be using a new lens that is based upon interpreting others' emotional language, as well as continuing to grow and develop my own self-awareness to multisensory observations to unconscious meanings.

Each head is 12 inches high and 8 inches wide. 

After almost two semesters, I notice how far I have come and how much more there is in becoming an art therapist. The horizon line has emerged as a recurring theme for my work over the past two semesters, which implies a sense of staring into the distance. I'm not there yet, but I know where I'm headed.

And I have to be patient and remember that every step counts. But each step towards the horizon is another step away from where I was. I'm burning my past self in an underground furnace to fuel my quest to become an art therapist, which apparently involves climbing a tower that looks like an upside-down Guggenheim Museum. I create to fuel myself, and I fuel myself to continue forward, step by step. 

These artworks represent growth, process, and newness. I see my artistic journey and self-exploration in these three works. Exploring the natural world and the interplay that can occur between my art and nature has been such a valuable lesson. I have learned that the process of creating and installing can be liberating and meaningful to both myself and my future clients. My portrait piece speaks of empathy and the artist self. It asks me questions and attempts to understand me through color and expression. The clay piece shows my artist and therapist self in unison- supporting one another on this journey. The more I reflect on these pieces, the more I understand my intersecting identities. 

This past year has taught me that I cannot ever really prepare for what is to come. As I come to the close of my first year in this program—which has been completely online—I reflect on the parts of life that I can prepare for. I can heal and grow myself—and eventually help others heal and grow—through the creative process so that I will have a deeper sense of security and stability in future times of unprecedented uncertainty. 
 
Throughout the last year, I have felt disconnect socially, emotionally, and academically...the list could go on. But creating art about myself and the developing parts of my identity has been grounding through this disconnect because it has forced me to focus on myself, my growth, and my vision for this career. It was the first time in a while that I have created artwork of myself, and that process has proven to be deeply reflective. Making space for my intersecting identities has given me a more holistic view of myself as a whole, and I am eager to continue this work. 

Through my artwork, vibrant energies burst, while translucent rivers run. The push and pull of the mediums beneath my hand bringing alive a place I've been before. Chaos surrounding me in every shape. Through the sugar-coated moments and richly filled cracks covering what once was. My art speaks to where I am now, on a journey of the self. Exploring the vibrancy in each chaotic stroke, and the muddied moments that cross over one another. Stuck in this sweet spot of exploration.

In my artworks, I explore the space between myself and the environment as an artist and art therapist. While investigating a safe place for myself, I search for a safe place for others. In the installation piece, I search for space ‘in-between’ internal (myself)and external(environment).

Inthis ‘in-between’ space as a safe place for me and clients to appreciate the self therapeutically. The environment has played an important part in making the ‘in-between’ space because sculpture is in response to the surroundings it’s in. I am drawn to the energy, movement, colors, and transformative quality of the ‘in-between space’. It encourages one to view self through the lens of the environment. As I search for the self within the surroundings, I look for grounding and the circle's artwork speaks about it. The circles between organic watercolor drips are symbolic of the need of centering and containing me for a moment to then search for a safe space for others. The pieces show how I would like to strike balance between myself, artist self, and art therapist self with ecology.  

In my work, I explore what it means to me to be an art therapist in my full, multifaceted identity. The work that I have been exploring all semester has been to conceptualize myself as an artist with the power to create and tell my story, a therapist with the capacity to listen and bear witness, and an art therapist to nurture capabilities and support areas for growth. 

The challenge to the artist is to be fueled by creation yet hindered by self doubt. The therapeutic relationship between myself, clients, and the work is fueled by heart and understanding for continuous growth. I am a work in progress and so is my work, and those I work with. My time in the studio has provided the space for me to connect with a sense of vitality greater than myself and explore these areas of growth. 

The concept of my creation this time is to integrate myself internally and externally through artistic creation.

The first one, the external. Including cognition, consciousness, appearance, and visible result of the creation is more concrete.

The second work, the internal. Including symbolic, subconscious, emotions, and ideas for creation. Going back and reading all the artworks and journals, I found that I would first focus on the external shapes and colors and then discuss the meaning that the works give me. And when I know my identity through artistic creation, I think about the environment, my family, and my appearance first, and then I gradually approach my inner life. However, both the external and the internal are all mentioned in my weekly diary.

In the third work, integration, I tried to show the weekly creations on one fabric using the wool felt. I was pleasantly surprised to find that all my art creations are all related.