Group Therapy

I’d imagine its impossible to write a blog on the topic of art and mental health without eventually having to consider the practice of art as therapy. So I’ve come to Belfast his week to hook up with some old friends and to take part in some of the Northern Ireland Group for Art Therapy’s summer school.

I have two aims for my time here

1) Find out what Art Therapy is and how it is practiced
2) Take part in some practical workshops and see if it works

So far the most compelling presentation on the practice of Art Therapy has been with a lady called Karen Huckvale who practices as an art therapist within the NHS in Devon and who is also an artist. Karen clearly approaches her work from a Jungian perspective as she made constant references to alchemy during her presentation. Jung saw artistic processes as accessing the subconscious through symbols and storytelling and thought that most human struggles originated in material stored in the subconscious.

She told a captivating story about an eleven year old girl with an abusive family history, with whom she had spent 30 hours separating glitter and sand in a process that seemed to be symbolic of transition and recovery. Her role as therapist was as a listener and a guide with the materials and art making acting as prompts for discussion and disclosure. This had clearly been a relationship where the development of trust was crucial with the art making providing a way of focusing feelings and images and providing shared goals.

Yesterday I also did my third three hour art therapy workshop with a group of six other women. I’ve been finding these sessions pretty tough going. Its amazing how four years of arts training has in some way damaged my most basic ability to make mess with materials and to be primitively and frantically creative. I could not in any way say that what I have produced has been part of my art practice….. but it has been oddly therapeutic. The pieces that I have made have been about my own experiences of my body, particularly focusing on heart and lungs. This has been stimulated by our workshop leader Saadia Parvez who has been leading us in a number of mediative and breathing techniques as well as more artistic and pictorial processes. Yesterday as a group of six women we all held hands and let out the most liberating and earth shattering scream as a way of rediscovering our voices and connecting with the energy in the group.

I’ve uploaded some of the images that I have produced so far. I feel a strange kind of embarrassment in doing this as they seem so naïve and unaccomplished!! But its also wonderful to rediscover that not everything that I produce has to be perfect and that not everything that I am not proud of has to remain a secret!!

The term ’emotional and psychological disturbance’ is taking me to interesting places.

I’ve been curled up with a vat of espresso and the latest edition of Mute magazine for the past half hour. I’ve stopped reading part way through an interview with artist Alexa Wright (interviewer Stefan Szczelkun) as there are a few passages in here which feel are worth documenting.

The interview touches on the theme of trauma and emotional affect, an area that I have been reading around quite extensively in the past week or so. There is discussion of Wright’s work Killers made in 2002, which situates it’s audience in solitary booths and plays back narratives of murders telling the real life stories of how they killed someone and how it made them feel. This is identified in the interview as a moment of transgression, where the viewer is forced to confront something beyond the normal experience of being human and to deal with their own hateful or empathetic response to these confessions.

There is a reference made to Kristeva here and her use of the term abject:

“According to Kristeva, what causes abjection is anything that disturbs our sense of identity, system or order. Anything, or perhaps anyone, that is in-between, ambiguous or composite.”
Alexa Wright

The interview then brings in the theme of trauma which the interviewer describes as:

“An experience that overwhelms one’s ordinary emotional abilities – something that is too difficult to process with the resources you have at that time.”
Stefan Szczelkun

Killers takes the transgression of an excepted social norm to territories that encounter emotional extremity or trauma. Of course what it might also highlight is the level of emotional and psychological disturbance that lead to the murderous acts and the level of such disturbance that is translated to the viewer during their encounter with the work. We are in the realm of deviation where shock can equal disturbance and emotions that are are almost too difficult to process.

While the piece does not deal overtly with ‘mental health’ it seems to ask the viewer to consider the extremity of what the disturbed mind can conjure. Yet by instigating the moment of an intimate encounter between artwork and audience it also emphasises the fact that such grotesque acts generate from everyday human minds that function just like our own.

In its way the above is only speculation as I have not seen the work and have only read this single interview with Alexa Wright. But it been a useful read in terms of exploring trauma in the emotive encounter and the reconciling psychological extremes into the everyday. Here’s a last quote from the artist:

“I am interested in exploring the fears and prejudices that set in when we are unable to establish a clear and tangible boundary between what we thing of as ‘us’, ‘really normal’ people and ‘others’. Alexa Wright

All quotes taken from Stefan Szczelkun’s interview with Alexa Wright in Mute Vol 2 Issue 16 http://www.metamute.org Listen to audio extracts from Alexa Wright’s work Killers here: http://www.alteregoinstallation.co.uk/main_site/ki…

I got very frustrated last weekend when I couldn’t attend a seminar at the Arnolfini called The Lost Object: On Gesture and Psychoanalysis http://www.arnolfini.org.uk/whatson/events/details… due to work commitments. However thanks to the genius of the Arnolfini’s marketing department there is now an audio recording of the first part of the afternoon available online which I have been pouring over this morning and am excited to report back on http://www.arnolfini.org.uk/downloads/LostObject71…. I am in the process of pestering the Arnolfini about getting the rest of the presentations online, particularly so that I can hear psychotherapist Professor Jeremy Holmes make his presentation.

The seminar referenced the exhibition Otto Zitko and Louise Bourgeois; Me, Myself and I, which has just closed at the Arnolfini. It focused specifically on the relationship between psychoanalysis and drawing but also explored wider themes of memory and the subconscious.

Tom Trevor director of the Arnolfini spoke first and discussed the curatorial process that fed into the exhibition. He brought up the very interesting fact that he had considered including Antonin Artaud’s http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonin_Artaud drawings in the show alongside Zitko and Bourgeois. I have come across Artaud’s drawings before but I did not know that many of them were made in the later stages of his life when he was very ill and having electroconvulsive therapy for what are retrospectively thought to be symptoms of schizophrenia. He’s of particular interest to me for his writings on theatre and is someone to research at more at some point.

Next Ann Coxon Curator at Tate Modern read from her forthcoming book on Louise Bourgeois, making detailed mention of the artists insomnia drawings. As a lifelong insomniac I’ve always identified with this series of Bourgeois work and it’s frenetic style. Coxon specifically drew comparison between these works and the process of meditation, noting that their consistent use of circular patterns and repetitive imagery mirrors a kind of rocking motion and the gentle attempt to lull oneself into sleep. One aspect of Bourgeois life that Coxon particularly foregrounded was her role as a mother. For some reason I had never imagined a woman like Bourgeois having children, but apparently she had three daughters and was famed for saying that a woman can only ever come to understand her own mother when she herself gives birth to children. I guess the cyclical implications of this make sense. A lot of Bourgeois work often portrays issues of nurturing and care, offset against anger and betrayal, which I can see now might express the duality of being both mother and daughter and understanding this difficult relationship from both perspectives.

So I am really hoping that the Arnolfini makes the second half of the seminar available and I can continue to chew over these presentations. From what I have heard so far they didn’t really succeed in getting to the truely meaty psychoanalytical stuff but hopefully this happens later in the afternoon. To be continued…..!

Oh and I forgot to mention….

I’ve dug out this exhibition catalogue for a Haywood touring exhibition that Jill Bennett mentions in her book Empathic Vision (see post from 24th June). It uses Trauma mostly in relation to a more collective awareness of national and international disasters from what I can tell so far…., but its got some pretty interesting artists in it such as Willie Doherty and Felix Gonzalez-Torres. I’ll let you know how it is when I have had a proper read!

Its been an intense couple of weeks and it seems that my focus has drifted slightly from this project to other seemingly more pressing matters. Last Tuesday saw me in London for a job interview, after which I decided to spend my afternoon in the pub with my London friends. The wine flowed a little too freely leading me to abandon my last train home in favor of another glass. It was a beautiful feeling arriving for work in Liverpool on Wednesday morning in yesterday’s job interview clothes, especially on one of the hottest days of the year! But it was worth it, I have no regrets!

In general the world seems to be a brighter place then is was six months ago and I am pleased that I managed the very intense trip down South with no major panic attacks. Therapy seems to finally be helping me make some changes. Its probably the kind of stuff thats undetectable to anyone else, but for me its really important. Its amazing how learned behaviors that a person creates for themselves over the course of a lifetime can be so detrimental, but can build such a clear and incontrovertible image of what reality looks like. Its nice to begin to believe that I am actually living in a kinder world than the one that I had created for myself!

I attended a really nice dance and health session at the Bluecoat last night that was run by Liverpool Improvisation Collective. We practiced what the workshop leader called ‘toweling:’ a form of body therapy where one participant moves the other’s limbs using a towel. Sounds very bizarre indeed, but having your limbs lifted and released with such a none invasive method of touch is a bit like floating in water. It left me feeling intensely relaxed! I’m also back in Wales for a day of Feldenkrais with Veronica this weekend. I’m hoping the weather holds out so that I can walk by the river afterwards.

So…. I will try to get back on topic with my next post. I’m becoming very aware that I need to expand my research methods in order to find other artists who I might potentially invite to the exhibition. I’ve got a great shortlist list at the moment, but it’s probably not even half of a proper show.