About Arts Therapy

Arts Therapy in practice.

If you're wondering 'what is Arts Therapy' and how is this allied health service effective and different, we are here to clarify. Importantly, Arts Therapy does not require your to be an artist or have any experience with creating. Rather, it is about the process of incorporating modalities as part of therapeutic creative processes to help give you the words, images, symbols, feelings and sensations as a tool. We hold space for what you need.

Our experienced practitioners at Papernook hold Masters degrees and share values of emergence, lived experiencing, multimodality and relationality (MIECAT). This means we remain open-minded and curious to what shows up for each person in therapy, particularly through the use of tactile materials, arts making and creative processes. We often incorporate various objects, tools, resources, sound, music, movement and other forms of expression in responding or exploring with to support embodied 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.

Example: This photograph shows a handful of seedpods. It could also represent holding life's expectations and competing priorities. In therapy, we will often slow a process down and support a person to explore how it feels. In this way, we can invite adding more seed pods to the cupped palm. There might be a hope or challenge expressed of not dropping any. The hand continues to fill up and supports a real-time in-the-moment strain of holding all of these "expectations".

We will often 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. This analogy and insight from the experiential process can support decision making.

See more examples.

Below is a gallery of creative processes taking place in Arts Therapy. Whether it's drawing, painting, sand play, arranging found objects, making sound or even hand building with clay - every person's use of materials in therapy will look a little different and tailored 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. Our services are not suitable for those looking to engage in 'art craft' classes.