Mask portraits and I

Art making and creating an image have been with me since I was a toddler. I had my art space, art materials and I somehow understood I could use it as a container, a silent witness, my best friend and safest emotional processing way to express what I had no words for.

It has been the most beneficial and powerful ‘band-aid’ to manage my mental health, chronic pain and fatigue, and how I feel about it.  I am a very resilient person, but some days it is very hard to live with it without feeling anxious and depressed!  So, art making, journaling and creating new artwork just takes the edge off.  I can see that I am being productive and that always gives me hope and joy no matter what pain levels my body is in or if the anxiety of PTSD is being retriggered.  I get solace and peace.

Art is my most efficient and reliable resource to express, sense-make, process and hold what is disturbing and painful.  I can process my own feelings and thoughts and do it as I need to. Specifically, it holds and contains whatever is being communicated without any projection, any answering back or any negative aspect. I think that is the key – it is an empathic and trusty friend to share experiences with.

Mask portraits

Art and trauma are processed in the same part of the brain, so it is no surprise to read in neuroscience how art – but more specifically how a mask making process leads to words, words that never found form. Masks offer a way to explore experiences and how our stories can change with time. I am aware that at times I need to wear masks to stay safe and to establish boundaries, and I can also remove them as I need. Trust, respect and boundaries are all part of establishing a positive self-care regime. Mostly I use mask-making as my art-form, but I also use mixed media to communicate depending on what is needed e.g. emotional, mental or physical holding of an image or a piece of art.

My art process helps me when I need to go to therapy, whether that is art or drama therapy. This is a choice I have made.  It gives me space to prepare prior to upcoming events that I know will flatten me physically and emotionally. I know art making is my band-aid to understanding what I need, and I have the insight and resilience to prepare so I can overcome any difficulty.

Fibromyalgia, head injuries and PTSD may be invisible illnesses, but my art makes it visible, gives it texture, layers and colour.  Fibromyalgia and PTSD are now my ‘friends’ too, I am not them, but they come to visit me at varying frequencies of pain and fatigue daily. I just accept them and find a compassionate way to live my life with them, although sometimes I just wish they would take an extended holiday.  Recovery along with living a life is a shapeless and timeless kindness I have given myself.  How can I possibly know that point in time when I am just a different version of myself as I change and grow. I am as resilient as I can be. I am not to be fixed by others, but to find the ‘way’ that works for me to grow into what the experience has left me with.  It was my old friend that held the key, that somehow helped me understand myself and what I needed most.

Processing my thoughts and feelings through art making helps me to self-appraise and to locate the words to say what I feel and think.  Journaling along with art making is a very valuable asset to take to therapy, whether that is to a creative art therapist (art, drama, music or dance) or other psychotherapeutic therapies or even counselling.  It assists the therapist to get to know me and guide the healing process. Art is especially valuable to process and heal from traumatic experiences, and to assist in healing from PTSD anxiety.

My interest in art and therapy lead me to become a trainee art therapist a few years ago but I had to defer my masters due to my physical health issues. I was unwilling to defer but my art was making it clear that I had to stop – however the training I had done had given me the tools and aids that I required for dealing with the emotional and mental health struggles I had.

How to cope with the pain and fatigue and how to deal with the desires and reality of what I wanted to be?  What I was and what was the actual situation? Just be with them, “just wondering” (as art therapists say a lot) – if sitting with it helps – or often floating with it – streets away but at least aware this is the only way to face it – this takes a step into bravery, a courage and a self-care and self-love process for the self. To have the safe space to be the shape of you, to have time and resources to heal. To understand and to accept and to heal. To be able to accept you need to firstly do some understanding and then create a safe space for healing and recovery.

“Mirror, Mirror!”

“What we call the beginning is often the end. And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from”.

An extract from T.S. Eliot’s the Four Quarters.

My own studio Practice and Process.

Mirror, Mirror on the wall (Seeing who I am Inside and Out)

This live project was an art studio based ceramic process which was developed in stages, in my studio. It was a mask making process that allowed me to understand its relationship as a communications material to sense make in art therapy practise/art studio.

Materials: porcelain and mixed media. The materials involved and the physical changes in those materials over the course of the process are also of benefit to the understanding and acceptances of mental and emotional personal processing and cognition.

Images 1-4 are a small example of the self-practice in my studio.