ART THERAPY
In my clinical practice I also make use of art Therapy experiences that involve bodily and imaginative processes. Interaction with clay, colors, photos, rhythms, dramatization allow us to make contact, shape and transform experiences, emotions, thoughts and images in a direct and concrete way, involving bodily en cognitieve aspects.
The possibility to use creative and intuitive self-expression during the psychological support process facilitates awareness of personal aspects that are difficult to explain and contact with words.
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Art-therapy experiences have a transformative value: it is possible to use artistic and expressieve languages in order to modulate, transform and expand our expressive potential, our awareness and ability to manage emotions. It allows the acquisition of a progressive feeling of body-mind integration.
Why do I use clay in interviews
Often in providing a piece of clay to someone I have noticed, from the first contact, the irrepressible desire to change, move from one side to the other, leaving traces, to see the effect of one's pressure on the surface, to test: the consistency, the smell, the temperature, the weight. As if it were a need instinct to contact, transform or avoid the clay. The condition to give shape is the tactile contact which involves the person in his/her psychophysical integrity. Shaping the clay can stimulate the feeling of effectiveness and competence, allowing a lived experience of pleasure and self-esteem, of being present here and now in one's own intimate space. The gestures brought to the material and solicited by it can be various: crushing, penetrating, touching, stroking, kneading, breaking up, sliding with water, etc ...
They concern the individual modes to interact with the world and they are the mirror of psycho-physical tensions.
The same gestures narrate to clay feelings, needs, memories, fantasies, desires.
Emotions can thus be intergrated to the existential experience. The relation with clay is a real dialogue through which the Ego can express its own representation. The shapes that arise are Ego’s shapes. The shapes sprout from the repetition and the revelation of gestures where the clay provides a re-elaboration of body and self-imagery experience.
Thanks to the experience of shaping these representations, they can be changed for the better, for example we can take on different points of view, we can become aware of our boundaries and our personal space.
This allows the acquisition of new imaginative spaces, therefore new experiential degrees of freedom.
Weaving in art therapy
In my twenty years of experience as art therapy teacher the experience with the loom had a very important role, it was almost a necessity.
The work of weaving as a educational and transformative tool is oriented towards the creation of a canvas, a integrated "body" and allows to give shape to one's internal narration made up of experiences, discomforts, memories, emotions. In making your own canvas you can play with the various levels of tensions: slow, dense weave, passages, closures, knots, returns, shades, footprints, directions to maintain, to change, which give the possibility to those who weave to get in touch with your imaginative universe, considering that “the organization of bodily experience is the scaffolding of every psychological event” (Ruggieri, 2001).
The possibility to explore different materials, allows the experience of the modulation of tensions that can vary in the gestures of touching, caressing, pressing, supporting, pulling, entering, bringing to oneself, pushing, sliding, making space, which are relational and psychological gestures.
The sensorial tactile experience with the loom stimulates fine motor skills and awakes the feeling of small gestures, facilitates contact with a slow and delicate feeling.
The type of frame used in this context is characterized by a simple rectangular frame whose horizontal sides are called beams.
The frame represents the imaginative context in which the experience takes place.
The warp constituted by the vertical threads, concerns, the base, the stable and flexible rules moves with continuity from one beam to another maintaining the same tension.
The weft, the horizontal thread that passes alternately between the warp threads represents the freedom. It consists of a single wire that sails by means of the shuttle, guide and extension of the same hand.
