Art in the Shadows: Art that Reveals, Transforms and Restores
This visual presentation explores the relationship between creative arts practice and trauma, loss and grief, including the shadowy world of sexual abuse. It is an examination of what art and the artist, through collaborative creative processes, contributes to wellbeing in the aftermath of such experiences. I will speak of my recently completed PhD and the creative research projects I conducted with communities of women who had experienced trauma and loss and who carried the pain of these experiences for years afterwards.
My presentation will consider how artmaking and working with an artist contributed to their capacity to live well, better communicate and function within the world reducing isolation and debilitating feelings of loneliness and depression. In discussing the processes of creativity, I will demonstrate how this empowered participants to think, behave and relate in ways that until their participation had been elusive to them, including offering hope, belief and skills for a happier future:A remarkable shift for those who constantly lived on the brink of suicide. The presentation considers how artists delve into the shadows of what hurts, disturbs and stultifies, in order to offer something back that reveals, transforms and restores.
