Metaphors Matter
As an art therapist, I am a great believer in the significance of metaphors and as such, they play a key role in my reflective art practice. This has led me to explore different mediums and I’ve gingerly discarded notions of technical expertise and instead plumped for modes of expression that fit best with my feeling or idea.
‘Doodle’, 2014, was an attempt to pull absent-minded meanderings from the margins and relocate them on the main body of the page. I have always been a doodler, and elevating the status of the doodle echoed with my psychotherapeutic work and the idea of giving the unconscious processes time and attention and an opportunity to be known.
As an art therapist, I am a great believer in the significance of metaphors and as such, they play a key role in my reflective art practice. This has led me to explore different mediums and I’ve gingerly discarded notions of technical expertise and instead plumped for modes of expression that fit best with my feeling or idea.
‘Doodle’, 2014, was an attempt to pull absent-minded meanderings from the margins and relocate them on the main body of the page. I have always been a doodler, and elevating the status of the doodle echoed with my psychotherapeutic work and the idea of giving the unconscious processes time and attention and an opportunity to be known.
‘It’s Not Me, It’s You’, 2015, was a series of photographic self-portraits that emerged whilst exploring what C.G. Jung termed ‘the shadow’ part of the self. In thinking about the scapegoat, I played with the idea of projecting my shadow onto the world, hoping (and fearing) that it would reveal something of myself in a new light. Playing with photography in this way enabled me to think about how light casts shadows and creates reflections in much the same way as elements of our internal and unconscious selves do in the world around us.
‘It’s Not Me, It’s You’, 2015, was a series of photographic self-portraits that emerged whilst exploring what C.G. Jung termed ‘the shadow’ part of the self. In thinking about the scapegoat, I played with the idea of projecting my shadow onto the world, hoping (and fearing) that it would reveal something of myself in a new light. Playing with photography in this way enabled me to think about how light casts shadows and creates reflections in much the same way as elements of our internal and unconscious selves do in the world around us.
For our latest project, A Void, 2018, I chose to work with collage using images from newspapers and magazines; the potential for distorting actualities echoing the way in which social media is being used in this so-called, post-truth age. This method of working seemed to describe the excess of material we have at our fingertips and the difficulties we encounter in attempting to process it or use it in an effective way. I found myself thinking that the way in which we live is somehow collaged as we try to organise and make sense of the stuff of life amid the layers and complexities of the human mind.