Hand-crafted Healing: Art Therapists Create Change
Vanessa de Bruijn

A thin metal rod skewering a small round mass slowly rotates over red, glowing embers. With each turn, the embers glow a bit brighter, the perpetual movements of the crank ensuring that each side of the object is equally exposed to the glow. The heating is gradual, starting at the surface and slowly penetrating until no part of the sizzling object is left untouched.

Upon closer inspection, the object left casually suspended to cook over a red-hot inferno is revealed to be not a delicious marshmallow, but rather a paper-mâché model of our very own Earth. The fire is made of plastic, and the bizarre object lays on a table in the atrium of the Science Center art gallery at Edgewood College. The slowly rotating skewered earth is dazzlingly decorated with colorful, multi-faceted jewels and has been left carelessly to cook over a fire that represents our blazing ozone.

The installation is a piece in an exhibit called “Artistic expressions on Global Warming: Recognizing the problem, Evoking response, Envisioning solutions,” sponsored by the Wisconsin Art Therapy Association. Wisconsin art therapists conceived, organized and created this exhibit as a tool to translate the processes involved in art therapy into a socially and politically conscious message about the earth. For the group that put the exhibit in motion, art therapy is not merely a process that takes place behind closed doors between a therapist and a patient, but one that is integral in creating a larger understanding.

While art therapists are usually trained to use art as a catalyst to delve into the minds and hearts of their patients, this exhibit encouraged artists to flip the tables and explore their own feelings about the state of the earth and what it means to take responsibility for a planet that may be on a rocky road.

While this exhibit may be an innovative application of art therapy practices, the occupation itself is nothing new. According to the American Art Therapy Association, the idea of art therapy developed into a distinct profession in the 1940s. Around that time, psychiatrists became intrigued with exploring and following the creative expression of those with mental disabilities. Eventually, the interest spread to educators who realized that the artwork of their students was surprisingly indicative of their emotional, developmental and cognitive states.

Art therapy offers a solution to traditional “talk therapy” and allows participants to engage in a creative process that integrates various art forms with principles of psychology. Those taking part in art therapy can have any kind of artistic skill range, and the cathartic practices benefit both the young and old. Sometimes engaging in art therapy is a silent practice, and other times it encourages dialogue that explores the inner feelings and thoughts of the patient.

Patients of art therapy experiment with a wide variety of media and create expressions that can be anything from a decorated box to a group painting to the creation of a mask. Some therapists work with depicting dreams through art, and others incorporate dance or movement into projects with patients. Working with art allows patients to stimulate the visual, artistic parts of the brain, and therapists believe it releases thoughts and feelings that simply cannot be expressed in words.

Today, art therapy is a widely recognized healing tool and is used in an array of facilities that include hospitals, schools, treatment centers, halfway houses and private therapy studios.

Jeanne Zilske, president elect of the Wisconsin Art Therapy Association, said that nowadays people from all different fields and walks of life are becoming certified in art therapy because it is so rewarding. For Zilske, this exhibit means more than just displaying artwork. It represents an important step in which art therapy is applied to a global issue to touch more people on a personal level.

“Just the act of thinking about the problem consciously, I believe, has an impact both on the individual and on anyone who comes in contact with the art piece,” Linda Danielson, the artist who came up with the idea for the exhibit, said. “I don't presume to think that an art show is going to solve such a huge problem ... but it does foster awareness ... it is a drop in the bucket.”

According to Danielson, art is an excellent medium for getting people to get their hands dirty and think about things on a deeper level. She said it was seeing Al Gore’s film “An Inconvenient Truth” that inspired her so profoundly that she finally felt she had to take action.

Instead of picking up a phone or her checkbook, Danielson reached for a paintbrush. She then tapped into her base of artist friends and asked them to get involved with a project that she hoped would bring the healing effects of art therapy into the arena of global issues. She encouraged each of the artists involved to create a piece of art that explored their own feelings about the state of the earth and how each person is responsible for steadily increasing temperatures and damage to natural areas.

“My painting came from a very personal space, partly due to the fact that I just had a baby and that really makes me feel responsible for the condition that the earth will be in for my son,” Danielson said. “To me, global warming is not only a global concern, but also a personal one.”

Other artists featured in the exhibit used an array of media that runs the gamut from magazine clippings to trash to elephant dung paper (yes, elephant dung). Artists fashioned moving sculptures, like the one created by Heidi Endres which likened the earth to a piece of food cooking over a blazing fire. Nothing is enclosed in inaccessible glass cases like you might see at a stuffier, classical art museum. A plaque resting near a brightly colored orange and red recycled weaving actually encourages visitors to pick it up and turn it around to explore its versatility and the different angles of the global warming conundrum. This experiential focus reinforces the principles behind art therapy—that understanding comes from doing and experiencing.

Although many pieces created for the exhibit are personal, abstract or metaphorical in nature, one piece in particular tells an intriguing story. The small painting shows the bony hand of a skeleton cradling a small, fuzzy pheasant chick. This is not just any chick, but one aptly named “Bright Eyes” who was hatched by adults with disabilities at the Rehabilitation Center in Sheboygan. Bright Eyes was among several other chicks that were hatched and cared for as a project which taught appreciation for the fragile things that exist only in nature. The artist, Laura Griffin, is a certified art therapist who works at the center. She hoped this image and the story behind it would allow people to see a tangible example of the things we might be in danger of losing if humans continue on a destructive path. The wide variety of media used and approaches taken show how difficult it is to pin down a specific definition of art therapy or apply parameters to its usage.

Catherine Quinn, a master’s in art therapy graduate from Mount Mary College in Milwaukee and the programming chair for the Wisconsin Art Therapy Association, found that the process of creating her pieces helped her cope with her own uneasy feelings about the future of the planet. Choosing photography as the base for one of her contributions to the exhibit—a pair of images titled “A Delicate Balance” and “Meltdown”—Quinn transformed old photos through a process that, for her, symbolized the changes occurring in the ecosystem. Quinn first submerged the photos in vats of bleach and allowed the bleach to distort and eat away at the objects and images in the photos. She then dropped vivid watercolor paints onto the photos, allowing them to morph into new images that provide virtually no hints as to what the photos once looked like.

“The process involved many stages, each resulting in slight changes to the images, just as the earth changes imperceptibly every day and we don’t know what the ultimate picture will look like,” Quinn said. “The process was therapeutic in that it helped me express the feeling I have that those changes are indeed occurring, and it was a relief to get that concept out in a visual form.”

Quinn felt that the most important goal for the exhibit was to reach out to the larger community. For her, exploring such a monumental global issue through artwork is a brand new idea that could be an effective way to reach people who may not yet have been able to connect personally with this problem.

“Many people feel overloaded by print and TV coverage of current issues. Imagery speaks directly to the subconscious, or soul, or spirit, and often elicits a fresh response,” she said.

Quinn is one of many local art therapists who have taken the impetus to explore their field and push the boundaries of creative healing. In addition to her involvement with the WATA, Quinn said she conducts community art sessions and private art therapy sessions at a studio near her home, does art therapy at an ortho/neuro rehab unit at a hospital and contracts with VSAarts of Wisconsin for individual artist-in-residency programs as well as classes for individuals with disabilities. These ventures alone show that art therapists are no longer satisfied with a narrow definition of their field or title.

“We can’t just stay in our little world of art therapists,” Quinn said.