Art Therapy: Expanding Borders and Boundaries Through Artistic Responses (Art-thérapie : élargir les frontières par des interventions artistiques)

The current special issue of the Canadian Art Therapy Association Journal extends and expands the theme of mending introduced in the June 2019 issue, toward research conceptualizations and art therapy practices that explore the concept of the unbound. We invited authors and researchers to critically look at the relationships that may lie between and beyond our national, academic, practice, and individual boundaries and borders through exploring innovative art media practices. Furthermore, we sought new frameworks, materials, and perspectives for research and practice.

Within this Editorial, we (Haley Toll and Michelle Winkel) have created artistic reflexive responses to the journal theme of the unbound that represent an embodied, esthetic, and personal interpretations, as we hope to continue to include both participatory and heuristic arts-based practices, research, and reflections. Therefore, we expand our own borders between personal, professional and artist, by looking inside ourselves for reflexive and visual arts-based insights.

Michelle’s reflexive art response

What are your associations with the unbound, with expanding? With setting and holding boundaries?

How do these ideas impact your art therapy practice? To explore these ideas myself, I set out to make a response art piece that conveyed some of the struggles between creating my own boundaries in work, in art making, and with my clients, students, and family (see Figure 1). In their research, Havsteen-Franklin and Altamirano (2015) find that responsive art making, the use of art media to respond to the affect within the therapeutic context, includes important methods in the clinical repertoire of art therapists working in healthcare settings. Similarly, it has always enriched my practice and daily life. In this piece, I chose a nontraditional media, venetian plaster, which is applied on board in layers over layers and then sanded down to reveal new images beneath. I started without a plan, but included letters, shapes, and various colors. The letters do not form words and are not legible; for me a metaphor that words have a place in the art therapy studio but do not always have conventional “meaning”.

Figure 1. Winkel (2019). Flight and freedom.

When I think of our work with clients, there is a notion of the therapeutic relationship creating “potential space” (Winnicott, 1971) that helps them release restrictions, recognize possibilities, become less bound. Yet to do this, the therapeutic framework often requires strong boundaries to provide the structure into which they can grow with psychic safety. Rubin calls this a “framework for freedom” (Rubin 2005, p. 19), where freedom is balanced with structure. In this response art piece, I used the abstract forms but also gave myself a challenge to add a representational element, the landscape with bird on the top, as a way to symbolize this boundary. The recognizable provides a concrete image, or anchor to the freedom of the piece. This is similar to how we sometimes ask our clients to title their artwork by naming the art pieces they create in session, placing words where there may not have been any while making the work.

Haley’s reflexive artistic response: Floating liminal spaces

In many of my artworks, I continuously search for freedom and expansion. For me, art represents freedom to explore my ideas, ideals, and identities outside of my socially defined roles, such as my academic, editor, past-president (etc.) identities (Badenhorst, McLeod, & Toll, 2019; McLeod, Badenhorst, & Toll, 2018). I step outside of expectations, which are mostly self-created, to immerse myself within the image as a space of nurturance and nonjudgement. Lately, I have created artwork about boats that float into a liminal space of potential and possibilities (see Figure 2). I sometimes feel like that reflects my transient life, as I am continuously floating between provinces and countries, often without a known end point.

Figure 2. Toll (2019). Floating boat in liminality. Transient. Transitional.

This openness to ambiguity is perhaps telling of the field of art therapy and creating arts for inquiry, where we carefully hold the space between rigorous boundaries and the multiple potentials of free and immersive creativity (Boydell, Hodgins, Gladstone, & Stasiulis, 2017; Potash, 2018). In her work that expands the definition of art therapy to include community and social justice practices, Timm-Bottos (2016) compares the liminal, possibility-filled, and messy field of art therapy to the muddy marshland behind her childhood home. She describes being comfortable in these ambiguous spaces and practices that “decenter[s] identification” (Whitaker, 2012, p. 349). For many other art therapists and I, we trust art as a guide and as “a way of knowing” (Allen, 1995, p. 55) to float through ambiguous research and therapy, while discovering new and unbound opportunities.

In this (bounded) issue

Similar to the artistic reflections, diverse ways of conceptualizing an unbound perspective emerge in the articles within this journal issue and within the various sections, which include: traditional research articles, “Art Therapy in Practice” that includes theoretical works based in art therapy research, “Soundings” that represent lyrical and artistic contemplations, and a book review. Some of the authors have explored the borders and barriers that exist in personal and professional growth as art therapists, while others describe expanding the boundaries of art therapy with collaborations and innovative approaches to research and practice.

Friedland et al. present research on how art therapy students understand their professional identity partway through their training at the Toronto Art Therapy Institute. Their results have implications for how art therapy training institutions can best support new generations of students entering a field where recognition, finding employment, and receiving research funding can be challenging. Both articles encourage us to think beyond the limits of our identities to cross political and professional borders.

In this issue, CATAJ/RACAT expands beyond the previous efforts to publish abstracts in both French and English by including the full article from Sherbrooke, Quebec, Boudrias’ research, in French. The article describes the process of the Draw-a-Wild-Animal-and-a-Person projective art therapy assessments with clients. As written and spoken language are embedded with subtle (and sometimes overt) cultural inferences and informs discourse, another “unbinding” is represented by its presentation in the manuscript’s original language.

In the Art Therapy in Practice section, Buday (2019) describes a qualitative, phenomenological research study in the United States, in which traditional visual arts interventions are replaced with a single session photogram technique, providing a more flexible approach for women who are being treated for various types of cancer. Furthermore, art therapists, authors, and educators, Friedland, Merriam, and Burt (2019), ask “You do what?” within a participatory mixed method research study, and expanding Bookbinder’s (2019) study that questioned “What are you worth?” (p. 53) to explore expected income for art therapy services.

In the “Approaches to Art Therapy” section, art therapy researchers and practitioners share their empirically based insights to further the potential and recognition of our field. In their conceptual framework, authors Kaimal, Councill, Ramsey, Cottone, and Snyder present innovative research model recommendations that come from a pragmatic, esthetic, and practice-based research epistemological and ontological orientation. The presented model is particularly relevant for clinical and systemic-based art therapy with pediatric hematology and oncology patients. The authors recommend collaboratively aligning research with art therapy practice that is currently established on the ground within organizations, while highlighting the longitudinal clinical art therapy research at Tracy’s Kids (Tracy’s Kids Art Therapy Program, 2019), a not-for-profit organization that has provided 11,885 art therapy sessions to families affected by cancer.

With their lyrical, evocative, and imaginary writing-style, Whitaker and Riccardi (2019) author an article in the “Soundings” section that parallels relational, esthetic, collaborative, and social justice-focused curriculum similarities that are based on open and multicentered community art therapy studio practices occurring at Concordia University in Montreal and Ulster University in Belfast. With the spirit and history of continuously reaching beyond traditional art therapy boundaries, Whitaker and Riccardi (2019) write, “Not unlike a custodian of an art collection, art therapy pedagogy involves conveying an essence of care through community integration, particularly with regard to employing interrelated disciplines” (n.p.).

In the book review section, Elise Girardin reviews Rebecca Ann Wilkinson and Gioia Chilton’s book called Positive Art Therapy Theory and Practice: Integrating Positive Psychology With Art Therapy (2017) that is framed around positive psychologist Seligman’s (2011) PERMA model of well-being (i.e., Positive emotions, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Accomplishment).

Conclusion and new directions

Similar to our brief artistic personal reflections, this issue does not present linear or conventionally associated pieces of literature. Yet all of these authors reference and propose new ways to view research and practice in the field of art therapy. Each form of research has the potential to influence discourse and inspire others toward research and practice-based inquiry, and open up new possibilities that expand one another, similar to how collaborative and transdisciplinary practices may operate. Therefore, the authors with different theoretical perspectives respectfully cohabit with each other, and their ideas all contribute to a multifaceted Canadian art therapy journal issue. While art therapy can be seen as “a distinctly cultural practice” (Kapitan, 2015, p. 2014), we must ethically question our culturally and socially defined viewpoints based on a privileged framework of working in a helping profession. This may encourage art therapists to embrace perspectives that critique, question, and expand our comfort and boundaries in order to achieve professional growth and be able to help people more compassionately (Karcher, 2017). For Michelle and I, this began with reflexive, personal, and intuitive art making.

In the spirit of expanding boundaries, we are excited to announce that The Canadian Art Therapy Association Journal/Revue de l’Association canadienne d’art-thérapie is planning to create a new journal title that is both inclusive of our broad readership, and of our authors, while concisely describing our scope. Potential and proposed journal titles have been presented to the association Board of Directors and the journal’s Editorial Review Board, along with other stakeholders, while a survey is being circulated to our membership. We look forward to your participation, input, and perspectives on a new title that expands the horizons for our journal.

Haley Toll, BFA, MA, CCC, RCAT, RP (inactive)
Canadian Art Therapy Association
Parksville, British Columbia, Canada
[email protected]

Michelle Winkel, MA, MFT, ATR, REAT
Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
[email protected]
© 2019 Canadian Art Therapy Association