24. Embodied Wisdom in the Creative Arts Therapies
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JOY PATON AND SHERIDAN LINNELL 24. EMBODIED WISDOM IN THE CREATIVE ARTS THERAPIES Learning from Contemporary Art Practice wisdom in any field can be learned. However, it is not the kind of knowledge that can be codified for instruction manuals under some notion of “best practice” (Cheung, 2017). As Jean-Paul Sartre once stated, “[s/he] who begins with facts will never arrive at essences” (in Becker, 2009, p. 59). This sense of journeying to the “essence” or embodied heart and mind of knowledge is practice wisdom’s locale. It is unsurprising therefore that it may feel elusive to those in the early years of their profession and most certainly an enigma for those in training. Practice wisdom is a form of “moral practical reasoning” (Tsang, 2008, p. 131); a “personal and value- driven system of knowledge” (Klein & Bloom, 1995, p. 799). It is the “knowing-in- action” evident in “the artistic, intuitive processes” skilled and experienced practitioners bring to difficult or uncertain situations (Schön, 1983, p. 49). Practice wisdom provides a bridge between thinking and doing. It goes beyond the theory/practice binary, to embrace how one’s initial training and guiding theories are tested, modified and refined through lived professional experience. Learning in this embodied sense is about the kind of “knowing” equated with “changes in understanding” derived from experience rather than fact acquisition (Ramsden, 2003, p. 37). Those who engage deeply with their subject matter, “with the heart … the mind, and the spirit of play … will more likely come to grasp it at its core than those who rely on information, quantification, or objectification” (Becker, 2009, p. 59). The reference to play here is crucial: “to play is to [be] free … from arbitrary restrictions [which] fosters richness of response and adaptive flexibility” (Nachmanovitch, 1990, pp. 42-43). These are hallmarks of practice wisdom. Embodied learning is transformative, not only of knowledge but of the practitioner him or herself. This “knowing” becomes part of the learner’s “way of interpreting the universe” (Ramsden, 2003, p. 60), and engaging with it. However, there is also engagement with the idea that all knowledge is fallible and uncertain: “truth” remains provisional (Perry, in Ramsden, 2003). The starting place for such learning is, according to Eisner (2003), “the activation of our senses” (p. 341). This suggests the tactile and experiential nature of artmaking is pivotal for learning in the creative arts therapies. Central here, we argue, is an engagement with the insights and practices of contemporary art alongside an ongoing relationship to one’s personal artmaking. In considering the significance of contemporary art for the theory and practice of art therapy, a space is opened up to explore the particular form of embodied, practice wisdom – the artistry – that stems from developing and maintaining a visual arts practice. © KONINKLIJKE BRILL NV, LEIDEN, 2019 _DOI: 9789004410497_024 Joy Paton and Sheridan Linnell - 9789004410497 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 02:07:59AM via free access PATON AND LINNELL THERE IS NOTHING IN THE HEAD THAT IS NOT FIRST IN THE HAND1 In the psychotherapies and counselling, practice wisdom is most often thought to derive from years of reflexive clinical practice (Rabu & McLeod, 2018). While this is also true of creative arts therapies, there is another, equally important area of practice through which creative arts therapists develop embodied knowledge. For these therapists, the development and maintenance of a personal arts practice can be an ongoing source of wisdom that deepens insight into the therapeutic possibilities of the arts. For visual art therapists, artmaking is key to the making of a specific professional identity and the development of an approach in which creativity is to the fore. This is so for trainees, beginning therapists, experienced practitioners and educators in the field. The education and training of art therapists is about preparing practitioners to develop artistry in doing their work (Rubin, 2011). Such practitioners are able to use their imagination and skills of improvisation in conjunction with their accumulated knowledge of art and therapy. They can “think artistically about what they do … experience their work as it unfolds … exploit the unexpected, and … make judgements about its direction on the basis of feeling as well as rule” (Eisner, 2003, p. 343). These trademark skills of wise practice are also skills and processes cultivated in and by “the artist”. Having some kind of training and experience in the arts is a prerequisite for the professional art therapist. This seems obvious enough. However, developing the kind of “sense/ability” that constitutes embodied practice wisdom in the creative arts therapies requires something more. An ongoing engagement with art media is a fundamental aspect of the profession and is the “soil” within which practice wisdom can be cultivated. A committed arts practice and being active as a practising artist are central to being an “attuned” art therapist (Kramer, 1979). And here, it is the processes and materials of art making that come to the fore, even while the product of these combined “forces” – the artwork – is, seemingly, the raison d'être of such activity. This is true of client work in the therapeutic space as much as it is in the art therapist’s personal artmaking space. Through the direct hands-on experience of materials and media, the art therapist learns about the therapeutic potential of art. Indeed, making art “in a sustained, mindful and self-invested way”, the art therapist creates the conditions for not just understanding, but also for embodying such potential (Allen, 1992, p. 23). The interaction between artmaking and art media is a self-reinforcing learning experience stemming from and feeding back into the development of a material sensibility. Crucial though, to this virtuous cycle of “cumulative causation” (see Myrdal, 1944), is the giving of oneself over to the “play”: allowing space for the art media to lead and then “following the possibilities assiduously” (Kentridge, 2014a, p. 107). For this, the studio space (and the therapeutic space) need to be “safe places for stupidity”, by which Kentridge (2014a) means making space for uncertainty, for “following impulses … without a destination … [without premature evaluation] … allowing the work to take [its] time” (p. 128). Inferring from Maclagan’s work (2001), sustaining and accumulating artistic experiences in this way is as important for the art therapist as working with one’s own dreams might be for a psychoanalyst. Regular art practice can sustain art therapy 290 Joy Paton and Sheridan Linnell - 9789004410497 Downloaded from Brill.com09/28/2021 02:07:59AM via free access EMBODIED CREATIVE WISDOM practitioners over time as they face the difficulties and vicarious pain of working closely with clients who are experiencing distress, and it can provide a safe space in which to explore what may be provoked for the therapists themselves. Practitioners can embrace the contingency and uncertainty of artmaking and thereby expand their possibilities for “knowing” and “being”: Although the process of making is uncertain, I felt excited within that, as [the work] came together. Knowledge gained from art making is different to that of science and speaks without words, a form or style of knowing something. Art making expands my sense of self. (Robert Hulland, in Paton & Linnell, 2018, p. 103) Just as practice wisdom from lived professional experience needs to develop across time, so the embodied wisdom that comes from arts practice needs to be sustained through a reflexive process of “seeing” and “doing” across time. One dimension of this is by “taking a long look at art”, as Andrea Gilroy (2004) recommends. Doing so gives us the opportunity to reflect on what we see and to be changed by that encounter (Paton, Horsfall, & Carrington, 2017). The conditions for such trans- formation stem from what Dewey (1934) describes as the capacity of a work of art to hold “story” and to generate empathy in its communication of suffering and injustice. In this, art bridges different worlds through its capacity to open up “new fields of experience” or to reveal something new within the already familiar aspects of life (ibid, p. 144). Secondly though, in the dimension of “doing”, it is through a long immersion in arts practice and the cultivation of work or bodies of work across time, that practice wisdom becomes embodied in the “artist self” (Hyland Moon, 2002) of the art therapist. Practice wisdom in the creative arts therapies is a “bodily knowing”; a sensitivity that stems from “work with oneself – to make art [and] to feel the connection between oneself and the materials” (Levine, 1995, p. 183). For reflexive practitioners, “art as a way of life” generates knowing/s and ways of being beyond the clinical setting that can then be transposed back into the therapeutic context where art can serve as a “container for pain and suffering” (ibid, p. 15). Meaning cannot be forced and will reveal itself at the right time. Artists similarly sit, literally or metaphorically, with a blank canvas, with the tentative beginning of mark-making, the emergence of an idea, of processes. The art process can be therapeutic, even play the part of the therapist: I wait half dressed, frozen by the fear of judgement and rejection. Through the lens I pause time and witness the different emotions … the camera becomes my therapist, she