Transfigure, Transform, Transmute: Inner and Outer Change.

The inspiration for my four art pieces was the innocence of childhood. This inspired me because as a child you view the world with hope, inspiration, and joy. As you get older the things that you go through change the way you see the world. As a child you learn about the world through family and friends. As an adult you learn from experiences, and events that are going on around the world. I found as I get older I lose the hope I once had when I view the world. My intention with my four art pieces was to show how I have grown and changed over the span of my life so far. Each art piece represents a different stages of my adolescences. How things have changed for me as I have gotten older. Within all my art pieces I wanted to use colors that would give the feeling of nurturing. Because as an older sister I’ve had to look after my brothers. I’ve also had to look after my younger cousins. Looking after others from a young age impacted the way I viewed myself and others. As you get older you are constantly changing and growing. I wanted to reflect on myself growth. 

Typically, I have a habit of producing work with a clear intent to express my feelings — usually negative ones — about a given experience. This semester, I have made a few critical shifts; firstly, I have opened myself up to making more art that expresses joy, curiosity, and my inner child. This is something I have played with using various fantasy imagery, imaginative narrative, and improvisation. Secondly, I have utilized new mediums to include in my art therapy practice — such as printmaking — that I had previously viewed as only belonging in my fine arts practice. I also investigated mediums that I had not previously had much willingness to explore, such as sculpture. Third, I have developed a new approach to art making that is more process based rather than product based. This may be in terms of experimenting with how to manipulate a certain medium or a radical shift in how I am conceptualizing each step, or even how I am existing within the environment as I make my art. All in all, I have had the opportunity to choose a path of less resistance when making art, learning to listen to where the work wants to go and following it without trying to project my own agenda. This opens up new passages with which to express and be surprised by my emotions.

Throughout this semester, I noticed my process and attitude evolve toward art-making. Initially, I felt comfortable using gel pen and black paper because my fine arts background mind encouraged me to specialize in one thing and build mastery in various mediums.  I felt resistant to embracing the open art studio process because I did not understand what I was supposed to do, how to use the materials available without thinking ahead, nor how to venture outside my comfort zone and manipulate new materials.  As a matter of fact, I used to go into class with plans and ideas of what I wanted to create during each session.  I felt pressured to create a finished product by the end of the class session.  If I did not finish a piece by the end of class, I felt like a failure.  I was judging my work against my peers and noticed how they managed to finish works by the class’s end and I did not.  I still feel unsure how to extract meaning from this and what this means about art therapy open studio. Within the open art therapy studio, is there an expectation to complete the work within the allotted amount of time? How could this benefit clients? How could this hurt clients? 

I felt stuck in my fine art studio mind where I felt guilty and scattered without planning or creating drafts and plans before engaging in the artmaking process.  I felt like an imposter almost or a fraud artisan by not creating art that was not going to last, be destroyed after creation, did not look aesthetically pleasing, nor took a long time to create.  Gradually and slowly, I began to choose different materials to work with and not plan of what my in-class art projects would be like.   During the semester, I gradually became more comfortable and motivated to choose new materials I felt uncomfortable with.   

I learned that by creating art that felt sensorially fun and joyous in the moment allowed me to feel more content and calm throughout the remainder of the day.  As a matter of fact, my fine arts background’s creative process felt monotonous, repetitive, and stressful compared against open art therapy studio. Although fine arts artmaking felt calming, peaceful, and relaxing for me in the moment and even continuing throughout the day, I feared failure and creating something I did not feel proud of.  Not only did I fear failure, but also my professors were constantly surveying me and my artmaking progress and injecting ideas in my head as to what art “supposed to look like”.  I was creating art that was calculated and catered to someone’s expectations of “beautiful”, while also navigating how to progress personally. Within the open art studio, all these outside pressures were eliminated and the professor’s surveillance felt non-judgmental, whereas in fine arts, professors and peers judged my process and works.  I learned that creating in different formats and environments can be akin to flexing a muscle. I want to learn how to become better at using the material’s closet without any planning or preparation beforehand and dive into what I feel like creating.  I became better at expressing myself within the art therapy open studio environment as time progressed.  At the same time, what does becoming “better” within open art studio mean versus becoming “better” within the fine arts context? Is there such a thing as “better” within open art studio or does the art of creating in the present suffice in itself? Perhaps becoming “better” in open art studio means non judgmentally creating in the present.  

I did not create well within the open art studio space because I respond acutely and sensitively to stimuli, so I felt present in others’ works rather than my own. I was not present in my process and by being around others, it worsened my ADHD and my ability to concentrate on my own art piece.   I have ADHD so it is difficult for me to concentrate in the first place and being around others made it more challenging to focus on my own work.  Because of this, I do not feel proud of most of the work I have created and know I could have been more focused if I were isolated.  I did not enjoy my own art creating within the studio space, rather I felt more of a witness within the space rather than a participant.  I witnessed other people’s art making, conversations, sounds, choices, and energies rather than my own.  This disrupted my process and found it difficult to focus on my own thing surrounded by others.  

Moving forward, I feel unsure how to change from fine arts back to my art therapy open studio mind.  By moving back and forth, what will I discover about myself and the process?  I do know that I have flexed a new muscle, my open art therapy studio one and look forward to working more on practicing and strengthening my openness and ability to embrace the process. 

My work has begun to shift its foundation; it was built within convention and practice, which has now begun to transition into finding myself and finding my art—allowing for more freedom, curiosity, and exploration. I am driven by my intuition and vast landscape of emotion. My work evokes the presence of light and how it might emerge from the darkness—working within ambiguity between line and form, mountain, or ocean. In questions like where does shadow become the landscape?

For the course, I wanted to explore my chronic illness through different art materials. At the beginning of this semester, I had a really bad flare up that shifted my perspective of the world. I needed to use this course as an opportunity to dive deeper into my pain and into my thoughts around it. I’ve finally started getting answers about my chronic illness and my art reflects it. There are moments of hope, resiliency and perseverance scattered through the art I’ve created.

This semester, I aimed to create pieces that connect reality to the imaginal world, as well as the light and dark that reside there. My identity as an artist weaves through each piece, symbolized by color, mark making, and specific imagery. The end result is a more deep understanding of who I am, and who I am becoming as both a therapist and an artist. Each piece contains certain motifs that are meaningful to me and my artwork including eye and faces, swirls, and transformational figures alluding to change throughout my works. There is also a purposeful use of color that ranges throughout the pieces from vibrant to monochrome; this gradient throughout the works seeks to reveal what lies in our subconscious and how it impacts our day to day life. These five pieces took me out of my comfort zone into an explorative world where I could reflect on how far I have come, while working to further inform my sense of identity.

This series of works explore my personal journey into the world of abstract art. As an artist, my comfort zone has always been in inspiration drawn from the human form and organic objects found in nature. During my time in this studio, I pushed myself to break out of this comfort zone and explore the world through color and emotion. Color has always been an important component of my work, and these pieces all have their own intricate, bright color palettes. I have included pieces that are fully abstract as well as ones that allow me to show how this transition happened over time. I have included two paintings, two chalk pastel drawings, and two collages in this series. They represent the self, the state of dreaming, and the opening of the mind to abstract ideas. 

This last semester has been spent exploring and becoming more present in the intricate process of product-making through spontaneous creation. As someone who lives their daily life through careful and thorough planning, to make art on the spot with no proper plan of execution has been a personal goal of mine as both an artist and a professional-in-training who wishes to utilize art therapy techniques and practices in future work. The creation of art in the context of art therapy in a studio-based setting has brought many intriguing insights. Art has always been a creative outlet and form of self-expression that I often turn to in times of need. In the last few years of uncertainty and dreading the unpredictable as a result of the pandemic and other major life events, the creation of art has provided a safe, stable, and secure space in expressing the inexpressible through line, color, tactile form, and the visual metaphor. In the duration of this semester, much of the process revolved around the repeated use of color from different mediums and found objects, in which much of my intent was to create on the spot in the studio space I have been given the opportunity to use after almost two years of remote and isolated learning. Both the physical space and the social space to provide materials and inspiration drove my creative voice in finding new and different ways to make and see art. In these select pieces, I hope to share the same sense of comfort and wonder in releasing emotional tension I had felt in creating these works with the viewer. These pieces contain layers and details that may or may not be obviously presented, and I invite the viewer to make their own meaning, ultimately making the art their own.  

I have grown as an artist with the work I created over the semester. I was exposed to lots of different materials and stepped out of my comfort zone. This is not easy since I started to focus on the process more than the product. However, due to this shift of focus, I definitely see myself creating works that are more mature, meaningful, energetic, emotional, and powerful. I created art without being self-conscious about how others would critique them. When all the pieces that I have worked on were put together in this exhibition, I noticed that my color theme is formed by a combination of neutral and vivid colors, textures, and well-incorporated shapes. I am amazed by this drastic change. 

To create art, is to be myself. This course provided me the space to make art in a way that honored myself, and my evolving experience of therapeutic art. All art-making has the potential to be therapeutic, and I experienced art therapy in the context of psychological and expressive arts therapy theories. I revisited approaches I’ve loved in the past, art as mastery, art as process. I found new ways to intuitively make art and explore my subconscious. I learned how to make art within my Lesley graduate community. I experienced other’s art, and processes as therapeutic, and inspiring. I gained new insights from my own work, and applied practices that have been created by other Art therapists. This era of myself, as art, as an artist, and as an art therapy student is in early stages of exploration and discovery.  

Dive surface level atmospheric cloudy essence pretense 

Dive further 

Drift selfless ripples soften stance breathes assuredly 

Drift forward 

Clamber waving leaves pining stars golden skies 

Clamber through 

Wander by languid rippling moonlight swirled blue green 

Wander farther 

Amble surely soar mountain lulled fluid iridescence 

Amble on 

Stand adjacent remembrance observance movement sounds 

Stand still 

Found  

          diving 

                  drifting 

                            clambering  

                                     wandering 

                                                ambling 

                                                          standing 

To be further forward   

                                                    through farther on still… 

This semester my work focused on spontaneity, authenticity, and risk taking. I practiced creating without preplanning and keeping my art unfiltered, while also exploring new techniques and working with new materials. 

Each week I let the art materials speak to me and allowed them to curate themselves rather than be manipulated by me. I found I was often drawn to collage and layering in my work, which focuses on process rather than product.  

The debate of process vs. product in art is complex, but in regard to art therapy, process is clearly more important. Once I let go of what my art is going to look like, the process becomes more meaningful and the art more healing.  

Art therapy is centered in the exploration of self, so there is no better place to experiment with unapologetically raw art making. Once I embraced this notion, I was able to be more open with and understanding of myself.  

This semester I began to explore a crossover of a modified printmaking technique, and recycled art. I printed images on recycled cardboard and used a variety of recycled materials to create the textures and images in acrylic paint. The only non-recycled material used was a couple packages of model magic. I chose to explore this because I would like to explore art making techniques that are financially accessible to more people. The featured prints were created using a piece of netting, recycled foam, and a piece of chicken wire.   

The studio environment in this class facilitated opportunities to get lost in my own world of creating, even when we were meeting virtually at the beginning of the semester. With time set aside to make art, I picked up on projects that had personal meaning. Reflecting on my personal history and emotional processing, I hoped to find a path linking who I’ve been, who I am now, and who I want to become as a mental health professional.  

One day, we had the opportunity to work with found objects. Making art with objects brought in by the class served to “re-enchant” my own creative expression. I experienced play, surprise, and delight in the process of gathering and arranging. This process of gathering fueled my artistic process for the rest of the semester. I was reminded of my childhood, when I would collect objects from nature and create “museums” in shelves and boxes. I was also aware of the connections between cabinets of curiosities in sixteenth- and seventeenth- century Europe, and their connection to the origins of museums. The salient qualities present in my childhood’s makeshift museums, wonder cabinets, and present-day museums, are those of wonder and containment. I started making boxes that could contain the wonder, abundance and delight I was experiencing in working with found objects. As I shifted to two-dimensional collage work, I still found myself making boxes that contained what I experienced as richness and wonder. 

I create art playfully and intuitively. Artmaking is way for me to access inner wisdom. When I create, I receive a message from a divine creative source- from a realm beyond time, space, or form- and through the process of making art I can act as a mediator or translator to manifest it into physical form. Through this process and the product that emerges, I can make meaning out of the message. I have cultivated my trust in this process and the practice of remaining open to the image and insights that emerge in the moment.  

I am a collector of found objects and am entranced by the past lives, stories, and meanings encapsulated in them. Each person will have a unique relationship to a found object as it will elicit different memories, emotions, and thoughts for them. Taking a found object from its original context and placing it in a new context brings up new ideas and conceptualizations of that object and the attached meanings. I think that this transformation can be rich with meaning, imagination and insight. I have especially been drawn to using recycling and waste materials, which has revealed to be a metaphor for reclaiming and transforming rejected parts of the self. I encourage each viewer remain open, release expectations, and allow themselves to intuitively process my work and observe what comes up for them.  

Blue

The Blue in the sky was more vibrant when I was a little girl.

I turn my face towards the sky to warm my skin.

My favorite color was red,I chose the scarlet red crayon to color my curls.

The color Blue grew on me; Its gentle light held less chaos.

There was no sadness in the color that was the sky.

The color Blue was my mother's eyes, not the tears that ran down her face.

The color Blue is the color of the pen that I chose to write with.

We often forget what it took to get us to where we are now. It’s so easy to be critical of yourself and be concerned about the future. But when we look back, when we strive to remember what we’ve overcome, it brings a richness to our lives that we often take for granted. 

This piece is a self-reflection that celebrates the texture of my life so far, with hills and valleys and rough spots. Smoothness can be beautiful, but texture is what gives our lives meaning. In this work I incorporated deep blues, thinking of the ocean and its many depths. Though the sea can be tumultuous, it supports so much life and gives us immeasurable beauty. I have long loved adorning my art with gold, because to me it represents sunlight, joy, and worth. The dark colors, the ridges and planes are gilded because they add value to life. These golden cords that connect the pieces hold various meanings. They can be the veins of  simple, life-giving joys that carry us from one day to another. They can be the gold that heals broken pieces in the Japanese art of kintsugi. Or, they can be the threads of human connection that guide us through our journey and make life worthwhile. 

I’ll leave it to you to decide - what do you see? 

Through my artwork this semester, I've examined the importance of exploration. Rather than stick with the usual mediums or prompts I typically work with, I challenged myself to push beyond those confines. Instead of strictly working with watercolor, I've played with tissue paper, model magic, yarn, water-soluble oil pastels, and more. Most of these are new mediums I’ve never worked with before. By breaking through those binds, I’ve been able to reignite my love for artmaking. No longer am I letting my perfectionist tendencies hold back the power for art to be therapeutic. 

Poet Sha'ul Tschernikovsky  (1875-1943) wrote: "A person is but the imprint of their native land" (my translation from the Hebrew) 

I think of these words as I look back at my artwork and my process this year.   My artwork is my dialogue with the imprint of the native land that I left – the natural world, the trees and plants growing outside their natural habitat, uprooted. It is my dialogue with the cultural symbols that represent both the 'thorns' that I want to protect my family from, and the sweetness of the home I miss.  Art this semester has enabled me to address some of the 'thorns' and understand how they have shaped me.  It is my search for a landscape where I belong

In these four artworks, I saw the process of growth. Like the structure Kishōtenketsu, it started with trying to find balance, keep exploring, turning point, and finally having balance again by the result. I began by finding balance in the outside world. Then I tried to find a new perspective to see the world. After that, I focused on myself, exploring my fear. Finally, learning all the processes was my effort; everything blossomed. 

This semester of art making brought forth imagination and self reflection in a new way. Through exploring spontaneous and meticulous mark making, I was able to let go of preplanned compositions and subject matter, and delve into an improvisational method of working. Inspired by our dream analysis work, I focused on developing a feeling or sense of memory, without a logical context. Allowing myself the freedom to jump between art materials offered me a new familiarity with oil pastels, water colors, pencils and crayons and the way they interact with each other. Allowing myself to explore three dimensional work at the end of this semester, I tried to apply the same improvised energy to my pieces while exploring working with paper, hot glue and fabric. I am hoping to bring this playful nature of mark making into my future therapeutic practice, for I felt so rewarded by letting go of strict subject matter.