Art as Therapy

I’m really excited by some of the things I’ve started to generate as part of my MA studio practice. I’m beginning to see a real synergy between the things I’m making and the things I’m thinking about; perhaps in part due to personal therapy. A recurring motif has been the circle and trying to find order in disorder. Whilst these symbols or themes (particularly the circle) are fairly universal they continue to pervade my thinking. One example of this is a series of small shapes I’ve started to fashion out of scrap paper found in the studio. Over the course of the last few weeks I’ve taken to collecting papers of varying colours and types and then feeding them through a paper shredder I brought in from home. Evidently the accumulation of paper into an entangled assortment of colours and textures (see opposite) reminded me of my own anxieties having started on the course. An overriding sense of being overwhelmed with dates, deadlines and psychoanalytical theory, and desperately wanting to process this information into a more manageable form. Even during the first week when we were supposed to be keeping a dream diary I found myself unable to as I wasn’t even sleeping! My mind was just racing all of the time. Similarly the work I’ve been making out of paper shares a lot of these concerns. In taking a pragmatic approach I first started by stringing these paper strips together in long, continuous strands and ordering them chromatically. I had originally intended to be really stringent about their ordering; moving from warm to cold colours, but as you can see (bottom image) there are some inconsistencies.

One of the most interesting facets of the course thus far has been understanding that the meanings of art works created in a therapeutic setting are not always immediately obvious and can take time to unravel. Moreover their symbolic meaning may acquire significance through their repetition. Subsequently when I look and these circular forms I’m reminded of a number of different things, often ideas that run contrary to one another. For instance, in the context of the circle I initially start to think about a feedback loop – a type of circuit that allows for feedback and self-correction (linked to Control theory). In this instance the circle pertains to some sort of order and autonomy. Oppositely the circle can have negative connotations like when someone says they’re ‘going round in circles’.

To offer an alternative dimension to these conversations I’ve become increasingly interested in the mandala imagery of Swiss psychologist and psychiatrist, Carl Jung. ‘Mandala’ is an ancient Sanskrit word meaning magic circle. They are found in the art of many religious traditions where they are employed in the service of personal growth and spiritual transformation. Jung used the mandala as a therapeutic tool and believed that creating mandalas helped to make the unconscious conscious. Subsequently it would be useful to undertake more research into the origins of the mandala form and how these depictions may compare with mandala imagery used in Jungian literature.

Discussion with LS (Part 1/6)

A few weeks ago I had an opportunity to meet with Lee Simmons, an artist and art therapist who I first met whilst working as an intern at South Hill Park Art Centre. Lee was an Art Advisor for ARC at the time and studying on the MA Art Psychotherapy course at Goldsmiths (graduating in 2009). Given that I’m now retraining to become an art therapist I thought it would be good to catch up with Lee and get her views on life after the MA and becoming an art herself. I was also interested to know whether being an art therapist has informed her own art practice in some way or does one negate the other? This is what Lee had to say….

For the purposes of those who may be unfamiliar with your work I was wondering if you could say a little bit about yourself and your artistic practice.

Ok, so I’m Lee. I am a fine artist who often works in public spaces and the process of making the work and experiencing the work is a large part of each sculpture or event. The works are cross-disciplinary, but are derived from fine art painting (and ways of looking at painting), colour and human engagement. The work then moved outside and became a lot more experiential…. I worked with that fine art base for 4 or 5 years before studying a Masters with more of a public art focus (Design for Environment at Chelsea College of Art and Design), studying alongside interior spatial designers, landscape architects, textile artists… etc. And then about 5 years later I focussed on the psychology side of it and studied the Art Psychotherapy Masters at Goldsmiths, which is a clinical practice and not a fine art practice, but it has informed my own art quite a lot in unexpected ways. So I’m an artist who also works as an art therapist.

Could you say a bit more about making work in the public sphere? Were you making work that was socially engaged as a result of doing the Design for Environment course at Chelsea or had this always been integral to your practice?

I was doing that work anyway, but I was pushed to think about it differently. It was coming from my own concepts and ideas and on that training they really pushed me to look more at the spaces I was working with, and the communities, the histories of those spaces and making work around that – less work around my own ideas. It seemed I was too much of a fine artist for that training, but they pushed me to work in more of a design and research type of way, which was helpful.

You also mentioned the influence of psychoanalysis. Subsequently how did studying on the MA Art Psychotherapy course at Goldsmiths affect your art practice at the time? I think the reasons I gave for making art previously I probably scrutinised in a different way to how I’d thought about them on the public art training and fine art training. I became a lot more aware of how we think about and process our experiences and how art communicates these experiences. Sometimes I’d get an idea for a piece which would come out of a similar theme to my other works; it would come of that same line of enquiry, but I’d be more aware of my own background and personality influencing the work that I had done before so it became more difficult to intellectualise these pieces. I think that’s probably the case for a lot of artists. We make work with all of these different themes, purposes and ideas, but ultimately we’re making work that we want to make for our own reasons.

So did doing the course encourage you to look differently at work you’d made before?

Yeah, a bit. But I always knew that there were more drives making me do the pieces I was doing than those I had fully communicated. We don’t always need to say everything about why we do the things we do, though it became a bit more obvious.

Discussion with LS (Part 2/6)

I’d previously been deliberating a lot about whether or not I could be an art therapist. I generally find that when I talk about it to others they’re never quite sure what it is and what it can be used for. On that basis I’m interested to know what informed your decision to study Art Therapy.

I’d been interested in it since I was a teenager, and I’d also done a placement with arts therapists in 2001, which I enjoyed, though I decided to concentrate on my own artwork and doing social art instead of being an art therapist because I could see it as being quite a different thing. But the idea never really went away. I started to think if I don’t do it I’m always going to wonder and working 3 years on something (part-time) is really not that long in the grand scheme of things. Also in the past I didn’t know how I’d be able to do it. I wanted to do the Goldsmiths course, but London is hugely expensive, the course is expensive, you’ve got to have personal therapy yourself…. how is anybody ever going to afford it all? But then I found myself living in really cheap accommodation practically opposite Goldsmiths; working freelance, so I put in an application and got in, thought I’d do the first year and see how that went, and then I ended up doing the whole 3 years! I’m really glad I did it. And it was the right time to take on new information and challenge myself in a different way.

One thing that’s always put me off becoming an art therapist is that I’ve always felt that it would have a detrimental effect on being an artist and making work. Is this something you’ve found yourself?

It’s a case of making time. Also when people hear that I’m a qualified art therapist, and I get paid for doing that work, I think that they dismiss that I’m an artist. It’s as though you can’t be a serious artist if you’ve got a ‘good job’.

Do you find then that being an art therapist negates your position as an artist or vica versa?

I think I’m a better artist because of it, but I do think that people will take me less seriously as an artist in my own right.

Why do you think that is?

I think we like to put people into boxes. The thing is I’ve done loads of other jobs in the past alongside my art practice. So why can’t I be an art therapist and an artist? I think it has had an impact, people who’ve known me as an artist for more than 10 years have started to introduce me as an art therapist when I’ve only been working as an art therapist for a couple of years. They didn’t introduce me as a post lady, or a gallerist, but they’ve started introducing me as an art therapist. In fact I only do art therapy some of the time at work, a lot of time is spent in my current job on social art projects.

Are you happy with that balance or would you want to spend more time doing art therapy?

I am happy with that balance as the art psychotherapy is really interesting, but it’s quite emotional work as well and takes up a lot of your head, so it’s nice to be able to do other work that’s more action-based. I hope that for the rest of my life I’ll still be delivering art therapy, but I’d like it to be alongside other projects.