So, you’re not an artist, you don’t have oil paints, you have three children under 5 years of age, you have painful arthritis, you have no time or all of the above. There are a million reasons to dismiss exploring or developing what we know by making “art”. There are also an infinite number of ways to make art, or a representation of an experience, and many of these can be done quickly with very little materials at hand but with great benefits for you.
Below I will give you a very brief list of possible ways in which you can explore your holding experiences by making something in a short period of time. The ways in which you can explore are only limited by your imagination. There are the more the obvious forms of expression like drawing or painting but there’s also, for example, recording of sound, quick collage, dance, movement or a collection of items placed just so.
The only thing you need to do is be still, hold the question that is significant to you in your mind and your body, and let the rest express itself. Do not think, analyse or critique, this is just for you, you don’t need to worry about judgment, embarrassment or explanation.
Examples of quick and easy creative ways to explore and represent your holding experience:
Image Search: Close your eyes and allow an image to arise. Find a word or words that capture that image and put it into a search engine. For example, you may have seen a sun dappled field in your mind’s eye. You might put ‘field’ or ‘sunny’ into your search. Allow the internet to do its work and scroll through some images. If you find one that feels meaningful, stay with it. You can copy and paste it into a document or take a screenshot. If you feel like it, follow up with another image, you may have clicked into one that led to surprising images that feel associated with you original intention, follow and copy these as well until you feel you have enough. This can also be done with images gathered from magazines, newspapers, flyers, your own photos etc, it may be one image or a series of them you can collect on a document, a piece of paper or make into a hard copy/digital collage. This task can take a short or long as you like.
Body Sculpture or Movement: Holding your question in mind, close your eyes and allow your body to move in a way that feels meaningful. Breathe into this position or movement, note what it feels like in your muscles, your bones, what emotions arise, images, thoughts. You can add clothing or yarn or any other object you like to this. Once you have felt enough, if you have someone around to take a photograph for you that’s great, otherwise you can simply note down a few words describing your position. You can also note down those emotions/sensations/thoughts/images that arose for you. The image to the left is a body sculpture I made while exploring the feeling of purposeful holding for my doctorate, I recall the sensation of weighing both mother and child's needs in my hands.
Some activities specific to holding: You might take a heat pack, get it warm and hold it while you close your eyes. What arises for you? Did you find yourself inadvertently rocking? Take a hot cup of tea/coffee and walk around your house slowly, particularly places where you hold/held your child, notice how it feels to be in those spaces with warmth easing into your hands. Take your child's favourite soft toy, an item of clothing or object you associate with them, hold them, close your eyes, feel into what it's like when you connect with your child.
These activities might simply take you back to the experience of holding and that might be enough, or they may serve as invitations to create something based on what arose for you.
If you have a little more time, find some pens, pastels, paints, plasticine, scissors and paper, musical instrument or any material you find that lends itself to creativity. Ask yourself a question and see what emerges, improvise with your materials, keep working with these materials or movements and see where they take you.
Using unfamiliar materials or tools encourages unfamiliar and unexpected responses. You offer yourself the chance to see things in a different way. It’s okay, even worthwhile, to explore in a way that challenges your skills or beliefs about your skills. If you do consider yourself an artist, you can make a choice to use your skills for the explicit exploration of holding but it’s also worth the effort to step outside of your comfort zone and try something new or challenging.
If your child is young (or older!) and they appear interested in these activities, invite them into the space. They might want to join in on a body sculpture or movement, or make their own drawing, installation or collage. The interaction between you both might end up being the art you make.
Develop Understanding or Explore Further:
Once these representations feel like they’re at an ending point, for now, that may simply be enough. Or, you can take your exploration further. The length of time you engage with this is up to you and the constraints of your current environment.
There are many different ways to explore your representations to begin bringing more artistic understanding, conceptual understanding and/or a sense of synthesis to what you know. I will list a few here. Note, these suggestions do not have to be followed in order, go with what feels appropriate for you at any point:
Look Differently: Look at your representation as if you’re an alien and you’ve never seen any of the (usually recognisable) images before.
This naive looking brings a more open awareness to the representation; you might notice unexpected things. For example, you’ve only used one small part of the page, all of the colours are light, you’ve arranged the figures in a circle, the movement involved a crunching sensation, all of your images involve storms...
Give your artwork words: Attach words that feel relevant to your representation and what you've noticed. Limit these to a word or a few words so that you don’t start building sentences and paragraphs to minimise conceptual understanding and allow for non-conceptual knowing to emerge. Write these down.
Respond: You might want to respond to or explore further a particular part of your representation in an arts-based way at this point, you might make another representation using different materials or tools. Or you may want to explore conceptually, look at the words you’ve written down, do there appear to be groupings of words, do these groupings say something particular to you? Write a few words that capture the different meanings that arise for you.
Synthesis: You may feel ready to bring things to a close, for now. From your representations and/or words, you might make a poem, or write a paragraph about what you feel you know now, or a little story; you might build those images or words into a collage, drawing, installation that captures what you now know. A summing up of what you know can be either conceptual or represented artistically.
This is a short and simple description of the kinds of ways in which you can explore your experience of holding by making and then investigating a representation/s and generating a sense of understanding. This may or may not be conceptual. There are many ways this can be taken further, for example, working with an art therapist, finding a group of like-minded others to work with, reading books on arts-based ways of knowing, engaging in a longer-term series of representations etc. Hopefully this has given you a bit of a feel for this rewarding approach.
In a nutshell:
1. Sit with the question you wish to ask, for eg, what was it like to hold my child this morning/yesterday/when they were a baby?
2. Find a way of representing the emotions, sensations and/or images that arise.
3. Record what you have made with a photograph or a few words.
4. If you wish, explore further, interact with your representation – ask questions of it, look at it from a difficult angle, imagine a dialogue with an element of the representation and note these down.
5. Bring your exploration to a close, for now. Gather what you feel you know now into a kind of synthesis – visual, verbal, written or enacted.
6. Continue exploring and recording and please feel free to share what you’ve found. We’d love to see what has emerged as valuable for you.
While this has been a longer blog than usual, I felt it important to offer you a glimpse of an arts-based approach to experiencing, exploration and knowing. Hopefully, this will serve as a springboard for you own ways of making representations of and exploring holding.
Thanks for reading,
Ariel
This post is written by Dr Ariel Moy. She is passionate about developing mother/child relationships, is an academic teacher and supervisor at The MIECAT Institute and a Professional member of ANZACATA.
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