April 25, 2023

Art as therapy

I’ve heard writers and artists talk about this a lot – art as therapy – just something they have no choice but to do. They seem to be able to prioritise art-making even in-front of the cooking, cleaning, and care-giving, a lot of the time. I’ve never really had that, until this week.

In our day-to-day lives, it’s easy to make the art-making the secondary thing; the thing we do after the cleaning, the chores, the house maintenance, the care-giving. We snatch at ‘the moments in between’ to progress ideas or use art to help us think through some of the things that we find ourselves pondering. That may be questions like “What does it mean to own something?” or “What if the world was really ‘every man for himself’ and no one did anything for anyone?” or “Why is our immediate response to fear people and things that are new to us?” These questions aren’t made up, they’re my questions (and only a few of them).

In the ‘in-between’ moments, those questions are never answered, they are pondered. We feel as though we’re making progress, and we are, to some extent, but it’s not the therapy the soul needs to really understand what we think and feel about those questions.

This is my last week in the May Gibbs Children’s Literature Trust residency and now that art-making has been at the centre of things for almost four weeks, I’ve seen the difference. The flood gates opened this week and I’ve made actual soul-seeking progress in trying to process some of these questions.

It’s as if I’ve carved raw clay from the Earth and now, when I come back home, the job is to take that and shape it into something for others because hacking the clay from the earth has already satisfied the soul.

This experience is a good reminder to try and hold on to some of this – that art is defaulted to secondary when we’re surrounded by ‘normal’ life, but how might one re-frame things so that it doesn’t stay that way? What if, as Mary Oliver has so wisely said, “Giving your employer your second best attempt of the day?”

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