About Arts Therapy

Arts Therapy in practice.

We often receive enquires asking us 'what is Arts Therapy' and how is this allied health service effective and different. Importantly, Arts Therapy is not about needing to be an artist or thinking that you have to be creative. Rather, it is about the process of using other modalities and the creative process as part of your therapeutic journey to help give you the words, images, symbols or any other feeling and sensation as a tool for exploring yourself and your experiences. We hold space for what you need to engage.

Our trained practitioners at Papernook have Masters degrees and share the MIECAT values of emergence, lived experiencing, multimodality and relationality. This means that we remain open-minded and curious to what shows up for a person in therapy, particularly through the use of different materials and creative arts making processes. We will often incorporate various objects, tools, resources, sound, music, movement and other forms of expression in responding or exploring with our embodied senses to increase self-awareness and insight.

Arts Therapy is experiential, embodied and uses all of the verbal and non-verbal cues to build a more informed picture and sense of awareness about our situations and relationships. It gives us the knowing and emotional intel we need in order to choose differently, adapt behaviours, make sense of the world and our ourselves, and ultimately live more aligned to our values.

Another way to explain this, is to show you. In the image, we are holding all of life's expectations and competing priorities. In therapy, I will often slow the process down and support a person to explore how it feels. In this way, we might add more and more seed pods into the cupped palm with a hope of not dropping any. The hand continues to fill up or strains to hold all of the "expectations".

We pause and together, consider how this could or might feel different if we changed some aspect. Can we use two hands? Can we put some seed pods down? Perhaps we could lay them all out flat or find another object to hold these while our hand takes a break to stretch.

See more examples.

Below are a few images of creative processes taking place in Arts Therapy. Whether it's drawing, painting, sand play, arranging found objects, making sound or even clay work - every person's use of multimodality in therapy will look a little bit different and unique to their own explorative journey. We co-inquire together and you are supported at every step to incorporate different materials or aspects and learn new techniques with a trained professional. Sessions are structured and flexible to allow for emergence. Papernook is a health service operating under a therapeutic arts-based framework, so our services are not suited to those looking to engage in arts-only classes.