Emergence: Interdependent Response-Ability to Unfolding Precarity (Émergence : responsabilité interdépendante de réponse face à la précarisation)

Development of the conference theme: Emergence

In Volume 35 (Issue 2) of the Canadian Journal of Art Therapy/Revue canadienne d’art-thérapie, we invited authors to contemplate the following question through art therapy research, practice, and theory: What does it mean to emerge? As the conference chair Patricia Ki explored the theme, a few phrases stood out following a quick web search for the word emergence: the process of coming into view or becoming exposed after being concealed; the process of coming into being; from Latin, emergere, ‘bring to light’; from mid-17th century, in the sense of ‘unforeseen occurrence’ (Oxford Languages, n.d., para. 1).

Patricia Ki shares how the conference committee decided on the term “emergence” with the following narrative: The conference committee sat together, with our faces and bodies framed in Zoom squares beside one another, in the beginning of 2021, to ponder the theme of the Canadian Art Therapy Association/Association canadienne d’art-thérapie (CATA-ACAT) conference. The conference was to take place virtually for the second time. In our discussions, one of the committee members, Karen Stevenson, offered the word emergence. There was a shininess to the word as it was spoken. Several of us (as arts therapists do) echoed the sound of the word with a movement of extending our arms gently forward, like birds unfolding their wings. A shared moment of feeling uplifted by this word and the ideas it embodies for each of us, ideas that rise above the dark frame of Zoom and the depth of the pandemic. Emergence: Cultivating Hope, Creating Change became the theme of the conference. What are we hoping, trying to emerge from? And perhaps more importantly, what is longing to be brought to light, yearning to come into being, in art therapy practices, as well as our ways of being-in-the-world? Perhaps a deadly, wildly multiplying, and shape-shifting virus that seems to slip the grasp of human scientific control at every turn also awakens or heightens the awareness of our place as humans in the ecological system, and our interdependence with, rather than domination of, the forces of nature, the more-than-human world (Haraway, 2016).

Perhaps the existential and collective anxiety and grief that this pandemic brought about have compelled an increased openness or willingness for many to see, to listen, and to understand that unlivable conditions such as forced isolation, vulnerability to diseases, loss of loved ones due to inadequate resources, loss of jobs, loss of housing, destruction of livelihoods, and so on, are not unprecedented situations for many who live in this country, who share this Earth. Epidemics of tuberculosis (Stevenson, 2014), measles, Spanish flu, COVID-19, the horror of being removed and quarantined away from community, the deep sorrow of not being able to grief with community through proper burials and ceremonial practices, the mass removal of children to residential schools and foster families, were devastations that many First Nations lived through, and continue to live through, while contending with lack of access to resources and infrastructure for well-being as a result of continual state neglect and colonial violence (Hawthorn, 2021; Stevenson, 2014; Waterfall, 2020). State neglect and colonial violence are mutually constituting racism and ableism. As disability and transformative justice activist Mia Mingus (2022) asserts, disabled people, especially disabled people who do not fit within the white, cisheterosexual ways of being, “live with various forms of social distancing our entire lives” (para. 15), and have been harmed routinely by isolation, through the inaccessibility of material, cultural, and social resources, as well as stigma, fear, violence, and shame. These all have implications, not only for art therapy research and practice, but also in all the aspects and ways we live our lives in relations with one another at this time.

Perhaps this is what has been brought to light, things that many of us may have been reluctant or avoiding seeing: state structural violence, systemic oppression, climate disasters, deprivation of livable conditions for some people but not others. It is not a single unprecedented event. It is “crisis ordinary” (Berlant, 2011, p. 9), or an ongoing, unfolding precariousness of which any given event of violence or devastation is but a part. In this sense, no one is outside of this crisis ordinary, set in motion long before any of us existed on this Earth and continues to press forward through our corroboration of actions and inactions. One may have enough safety net resourced by privileges to avert personal devastations thus far, but “what about when the very air you breathe becomes a threat” (Mingus, 2022, para. 18), as COVID-19 so plainly demonstrated?

If there is anything that COVID-19 has taught us, it is the lesson that queer, trans, anti-racist, anti-colonial, disability justice activists and writers have been urging over and over—no one is safe until there is collective safety. No one is free from threats, violence, and deprivation until there is collective liberation. We are all, down to every fiber and atom of our being, interdependent (Berne, 2015; brown, 2017; Hooks, 1999; Lorde, 1984/2007; Mingus, 2022; Wagamese, 2016).

Patricia’s arts-based contemplations of the theme emergence

How do we emerge from devastation, isolation, sorrow, grief, complicity, shame—personally and in community? Knowing what we know now, how do we move beyond knowing facts and feeling guilt toward change in the ways we come into being, as individuals and as a collective of humans, to cocreate conditions of care, while “transforming the conditions that make injustice possible” (brown, 2017, p. 126), in ways that we may not yet foresee?

In her manifesto, How to Make Art at the End of the World, Natalie Loveless (2019) relates research-creation, an arts-based interdisciplinary method of inquiry, to the process of emergence. She describes emergence as a process that is generative of outcomes that exceed what is present in their preceding or constituting parts. Emergence may be helpful as an approach to arts making that informs practice toward change, makes space for reflection on moments that challenge us, and responds to questions that grasp us. Understanding emergence as a process of symbiosis, or mutual shaping between different beings, that produces new ways of being, may allow us to engage with the complexity of lived histories and living experiences, interdependent and paradoxical worlds, as well as “the difficulty of accounting for and responding to such complexity” (p. 25), while working toward the possibilities of a different future.

The name for this ongoing, unfinished piece of stitching and photography work arose through its making (see Figure 1). The piece grew from a conversation with a colleague about institutional racism, the words of unbelonging that have been said in classrooms to Black and racialized students by authoritative figures of whiteness (Y. Simpson, personal communication, February 7, 2022). Words that took our breaths and thoughts away in the moment they were spoken, because they felt exactly the same in the body as those words that told us “go back where you came from” when we were children on the playground, at the grocery stores with our mothers, at the restaurants with our loud-talking families of color. Words that felt like the walls were caving in as we walked through the hallways knowing that we were never seen the same ways as other (white, normal) students are recognized, that our dreams of becoming respectable citizens rather than despised immigrants through playing by the rules of this academic game were dashed before we even tried to reach them.

I thought about Audre Lorde’s (1984/2007) essays and poetry. Words are often the master’s tools that built the master’s walls in the master’s house. We were not meant to survive in this house. But that does not stop us from having words of our own. And if our silence will not protect us, then we build new tools with our own voices, sharpened by the words of those who come before us, held by the words that we draw on as companions, we build our own world. We build our own world through and behind and underneath this house, and we work toward a world that is vast and is kind to difference.

This work in its current state was created over the better half of a year. I worked on it while doing other work that was at times lonely and tediously administrative, and at other times collective and invigorating, but all toward the hopes and efforts that I shared with a group of artists, therapists, educators, and students to build connections, support, belonging, and community in a school. Alongside this work, I was reading the experiences and ideas adrienne maree brown (2017) so lovingly describes and offers in Emergent Strategies, about the tools and ways of becoming that may liberate all of us.

Creating this work taught me about moving slowly. Slowness being necessary for building critical connections rather than critical mass, which in turn is crucial for long-term transformations (brown, 2017). Every stitch, every knot, every encounter, every person, every being. One connected to another, building on each other, shaping one another along the way (see Figures 2–4). Creating this work shows me how interdependence is iterative: a series of repeated motions, shifting shape to accommodate what it encounters, being directed by what it happens upon (Ahmed, 2017; brown, 2017; Haraway, 2016), always anticipating different embodiments (n. v. d. halifax, personal communication, September 29, 2021), always moving with the unforeseen. There are loose ends everywhere: I run out of threads, I circle back, I pick up the threads that come before along the way—notice who is being left behind, notice who is always left behind, so bring them with you when you get somewhere (R. da Silveira Gorman, personal communication, May 5, 2022). This work is a fabulation, a form of creative storytelling that embodies the relational experiences and affective truths of the storyteller (halifax et al., 2018). It is a speculative landscape of attachment and detachment and the messiness of many paths walked at once alongside many evolving relations and entanglements (brown, 2017; Haraway, 2016). In my community, a common quandary that I witness or experience with colleagues and students is: what if my boundaries are your triggers or vice versa, how will we navigate our interrelated practices (Loveless, 2019)? This work does not provide fixed answers. It heeds Donna Haraway’s (2016) cautions in Staying with the Trouble and elsewhere: it is not an optimistic search for answers that lead to a perfect utopia, for it does not exist. It is a hopeful attempt to explore some ways of “getting on together” (p. 28), an enactment of “patterning of possible worlds and possible times” (Haraway, 2016, p. 31) for a different future of “finite freedom, adequate material abundance, modest meaning in suffering, and limited happiness” (Haraway, 1988, p. 579). In other words, an imagining and practicing of what a more livable world could look like (Mingus, 2010).

It is a contemplation of what response-ability would look like (Haraway, 2016), what it would take to cultivate the ability to respond to the damages of colonial violence and neoliberal capitalist exploitations. It thinks with and finds belonging in the family of things (Oliver, 2004): the fractals that embody simple, repeated processes that span across the landscape; the mycelia that run across the earth sustaining the trees and plant lives they connect; the decentralized leadership in murmuration as the path unfolds through collective steering (brown, 2017). This practice of arts making, imagining, and creating iteratively informs practice: the ways I move through the world, my interactions with people I work with and the students I learn with, about engaging with the arts for healing. It matters what ideas and knowledges and relations and stories we think with to come up with other ideas, produce knowledge, tell stories, build relationships, and cultivate response-abilities (Haraway, 2016). In each of us, this continual thinking with and becoming with are themselves a tangible, modest outcome for change (brown, 2017; Haraway, 2016). How might each of us practice art therapy differently if we were to hold in mind the centrality of interdependence and our responsibility to one another, rather than individualist ideology that attributes unwellness to personal causes? How might each of us practice care differently if we take the time, carve out the space, and make art to hold the discomfort of knowing that we have been complicit in enacting or furthering individualist, blaming, pathologizing, or oppressive ideology, in our words or in the ways we engage with others, particularly in our practice of art therapy when people come to seek our support? When we take the time and make the space to actively and honestly engage with complicity, we may be able to notice where we can make room in our lives to resist habits shaped by dominant (Eurocentric, colonial) stories about what it means to be successful, healthy, human. We may be able to organize together and make more room for further-reaching changes. Power is never totalizing, human and more-than-human beings are always shifting in their becoming. The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house, but if we ourselves become the new tools in our becoming-with one another, in our always-renewing kinships with the family of things, then the master’s tools will never take us down.

Issue contents

Outlining the importance of creativity in our emerging and ever-changing world, art educator Kelly (2020) states: “The complex social, economic, and cultural challenges that lie before us require that creativity be a collaborative pursuit leveraging diversity and interconnectedness to maximize positive outcomes” (p. 4). The Articles, Soundings, and Book Review within this issue interconnect to add detail and texture to our response-abilities, as art therapists, as we emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic.

Articles: Emerging response-able research

Response-ability to be ethical

As art therapists and art therapy researchers, compassionate, ethical, and action-oriented response-ability is integral to our work. In the Articles section, Sophie Boudrias (2022a) assesses how art therapists uniquely perceive risk of harm when using art within psychotherapy. The author compared art therapists’ assessments of ethical risks to both registered psychotherapists’ and artists’ responses within a mixed methods study. Boudrias (2022a) believes that this study “enables artists and professionals to be more aware of the scope and limits of their own field of competence, thus preventing harm to the public” (p. 63).

Response-ability to be innovative and accessible

Due to the current climate crises and geopolitical conflicts, the number of forcibly displaced peoples have been steadily increasing, while many remain in unstable living situations following Canadian COVID-19 migration restrictions (Government of Canada, 2022). In June 2022, United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reported that, “[t]he number of people forced to flee their homes has increased every year over the past decade and stands at the highest level since records began” (para. 1), while underlining a need for more support. Those who will seek art therapy and mental health services due to physical, emotional, social, and psychological repercussions of displacement will likely increase.

Art therapists have a response-ability to provide accessible and meaningful art therapy to those who need it the most, as refugees and people often live in places where it is hard to access a trained art therapist to receive services (Arslanbek, 2022). Providing art therapy in low-resourced areas, particularly during COVID-19 pandemic restrictions, requires art therapists to pivot and become innovative with virtual and telehealth art therapy (Collie, 2022; Winkel, 2022).

Moreover, art therapist Kapitan (2015) shares that, “the adoption of a globally literate, intercultural perspective is increasingly important to responsible practice” (p. 104). With increased online art therapy delivery provided to remote areas within cross-cultural spaces, we must understand how it impacts those who receive the interventions and support by asking people directly about their experiences in a safe, ethical, and confidential manner. Otherwise, we may not be providing meaningful and effective art therapy to those we intend to help, with considerations for people who feel disenfranchised and misrepresented, such as refugee children (Kapitan, 2015). In this issue, Arslanbek’s (2022) interview-based mixed methods study assesses the feasibility and appraised value of providing online art therapy to eight refugee children living in Istanbul, Turkey.

Response-ability to teach art therapy with adaptability and innovation

Art therapists and art therapy educators have a response-ability to provide innovative and adaptive teaching to ensure accessibility during global and health crises restrictions. Online learning is considered different from emergency remote teaching, with the former being more sustainable (Adedoyin & Soykan, 2020). As art therapy training focuses on tacit experiential learning (Hogan & Coulter, 2014) and relational presence (Rattigan, 2022), the quick transition to online teaching holds both challenges and strengths that must be analyzed and studied. During the pandemic, art therapy instructor at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Rattigan (2022) reports: “I missed being physically present with their energy, the spontaneity of art studio happenings…” (p. 143). Meanwhile, a qualitative study at Loyola Marymount University’s art therapy program found that female art therapy students who provided telehealth services “allowed trainees to find purpose and connection through their work, expand their skill sets, and confront the challenges of a new trajectory in their emerging professional identities” (p. 88). The study also found that, through the online art therapy practicum, students were able to access more diverse clients, to increase a sense of connectedness while isolating, to provide hope during moments of darkness, and to allow for safe spaces supporting creative expression.

In this issue, Beauregard and Pelletier (2022) add richness and context to the emerging literature of online art therapy learning during the pandemic by focusing on emergency remote French art therapy learning with female students in Québec. The authors share survey-based research conducted at the Université du Québec en Abitibi-Témiscamingue (UQAT) that provides insight on female art therapy students’ learning while the graduate program adapted to provide virtual distance teaching methods. Beauregard and Pelletier assessed the students’ sense of self-efficacy (SES) (Bandura, 2019) to ascertain how these delivery and pedagogical changes affected students.

Response-ability to look inward

Emerging from the pandemic, we look both reflexively inward and outward toward a new landscape of amended art therapy practices, teachings, and experiences. Stemming from Jungian (Jung & Shamdasani, 2009), Gestalt, and Freudian psychoanalysis, the art therapy field has historically integrated art making with dream work to gain insight into our lives and practices (Carpendale, 2021; Chu & Tien, 2014, 2014; Hamel, 2021; Hill, 1998; 2004; Moon, 2007). Adding to the growing Canadian art therapy literature on dream work within art therapy (Carpendale, 2021; Hamel, 2021), in this issue Boudrias (2022b) publishes a paper on visual representations in dreams and on implicit emotional memory with a qualitative arts-based heuristic research study.

Sounding: Emerging critiques

Since the CATA-ACAT virtual conference in 2021, art therapists have been resurfacing after isolation and pandemic-related restrictions, into community and shared physical spaces with new insights. The Soundings section of our journal endeavors to capture arts-based and theoretical insights as we continue to emerge and renew our practices. Ki (2022) unfolds, inspects, and critically analyzes masculine oppressive discourse within current art therapy standards of practice and poetically reimagines new social justice-informed art therapy ethical discourse. Through open inquiry, poetry, and arts, the author along with her teacher and friend Suzanne Thomson point to an anti-oppressive framework of centering emotions, care, responsibility, interdependence, ambiguity, and embodied arts creation.

Book review: Emerging interdisciplinary practices

It is our responsibility to continue to innovate an intrinsically inter- and multidisciplinary practice that synergizes arts and healing in various forms (Bucciarelli, 2016; Chilton et al., 2015; Czamanski-Cohen & Weihs, 2016). Stemming from embodiment theory, art therapists may find themselves integrating activity and somatic work within our eclectic practices. In the Book Review section, Dunleavy (2022) reviews Horowitz’s (2021) book titled Yoga Therapy and Art Therapy Interventions for Mental Health, describing it as a:

[G]roundbreaking contribution to the field of art therapy that demonstrates how to integrate and practice multidisciplinarity, how to ethically modernize in the digital era, and how to empirically develop and validate an evidence base for arts-based therapies and research findings. (p. 103)

Conclusion: Exhausted, emerging, and creating

Haley’s narrative: Dissembled body and the response-ability to be human

As I emerge from the pandemic, my heart and body aches as if I am learning to walk again among the physical community. My body was pulled apart and then reassembled twice over with the creation of three new lives during the pandemic. Life and living did not stop for me throughout the isolations and restrictions. As humans, art therapy professionals, artists, and researchers, we created new worlds and opportunities throughout the COVID crisis.

As postpartum pain continues to ripple throughout my body, the crisis may continue to reverberate throughout our souls. The feeling of “in crisis” may always be embedded within our bodies. These three drawings depict my visceral and largest creations during the pandemic (Figure 5) as I emerged as a new mother of three, now scrambling to understand how to function within a different world of inflation and disheartened hope, increasingly self-aware of my shortcomings and biases.

Figure 4. Patricia Ki. (2021-ongoing). The master’s tools will never (back details). [graphite and embroidery on photographs, crochet, salvaged threads and beads].

Figure 5. Toll, H. (2022). Creations in slumber [Pencil on kraft paper]. Private collection, Ottawa, Canada.

In 2022, art therapists may be perpetually emerging and responding to new realities within a changing world with increased response-abilities and insight. As outlined in the collected articles, theoretical articles, and book reviews within Volume 35, Issue 2, of the Canadian Journal of Art Therapy, some response-abilities may include innovating with new practices and technologies (Arslanbek, 2022; Beauregard & Pelletier, 2022; Dunleavy, 2022), questioning new methods and ethical practices (Boudrias, 2022a; Ki, 2022), providing accessible and meaningful art therapy to those who are underserved (Arslanbek, 2022), and looking inward with dream work and imaginal art making (Boudrias, 2022b). We hope that the ideas generated from the content of this issue will help to support further conversations among art therapists and practitioners in the healing arts, in classrooms, in future journal issues and articles. We invite authors to submit manuscripts that broaden and deepen our enactments of emergence and response-ability for the field of art therapy. Furthermore, writing that critiques established ways of knowing may cultivate hope for a better future free from oppressive hegemonic mental health practices and research.

As art making can connect existentialist metacognitions with the tacit and felt experiences of the body (Czamanski-Cohen & Weihs, 2016), the practice of creation provides the liminal space to emerge with fresh perspectives. This creative and open space allows us to contemplate our response-ability to one another, to the earth, to collective well-being, vulnerably and whole-heartedly, as restrictions fall away for some, while existing health and social precarities persist or even increase for others. In sharing our artwork and honest reflections on the theme of emergence, we hope to emulate arts-based reflexive inquiry. Similar to Ki’s (2022) suggestion of contemplating and creating spaces to explore ambiguity and discomfort through art making, we extend the classic invitation to create art, perhaps in response to the articles, and most importantly as a way to explore your unique circumstances and interrelations with the human and more-than-human beings around you, in the here and now.

Figure 1. Patricia Ki. (2021-ongoing). The master’s tools will never (front). [graphite and embroidery on photographs, crochet, salvaged threads and beads].

Figure 2. Patricia Ki. (2021-ongoing). The master’s tools will never (back). [graphite and embroidery on photographs, crochet, salvaged threads and beads].

Figure 3. Patricia Ki. (2021-ongoing). The master’s tools will never (back details). [graphite and embroidery on photographs, crochet, salvaged threads and beads].

Haley Toll, PhD Cand., CCC, RCAT, RP (inactive)
Canadian Journal of Art Therapy: Research, Practice, and Issues Editor-in-Chief
Memorial University of Newfoundland, St. John’s, Newfoundland, Canada
[email protected]
Patricia Ki
Critical Disability Studies, York University, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
[email protected]

Acknowledgements

Patricia’s artwork and writing in this article are indebted to Yvonne Simpson, Rachel da Silveira Gorman, and nancy viva davis halifax, anti-racist and disability justice scholars and activists at Critical Disability Studies at York University. Their sharing of affective knowledge, experiences, insights, and critical analyses have planted the seeds for the art piece.

At the Canadian Art Therapy Journal Editorial Board, we honor the life and work of Jo Ann Hammond Meiers, a Registered Canadian Art Therapist and Editorial Review Board Member who has served on the journal’s board for many years. With an aching heart, we offer condolences to her family, friends, and community.