What is Expressive Art Therapy?
“Expressive art therapy integrates all of the arts in a safe, non-judgmental setting to facilitate personal growth and healing. To use the arts expressively means going into our inner realms to discover feelings and to express them through visual art, movement, sound, writing or drama. This process fosters release, self-understanding, insight and awakens creativity and transpersonal states of consciousness.”
– Natalie Rogers
1. Therapuetic Art Education at a school for children with special needs
2013-present ( Two years plus)
Facilitating the creation of safe-spaces in a school using an intersection of visual art, creative movement and drama to express, empower and co-create. The Visual Arts program at the school is over three years old now.
2. Process-Based Community Mural for a group of women-at-risk
Mumbai, A rescue home for sex-workers- an AMAZING group of women struggling with nostalgia for their families, themes of freedom and personal empowerment. The mural took two weeks of game-playing, safe-space building and community-creation to make.
The closed lotus represents stagnation and fear, slowly blooming into an open, free lotus- yielding itself to the world. Each leaf represents a part of the community’s collective pain and longing to be home soon
3. Community Mural Making at a Theatre for Children
Mural Making under ‘AHA! International Theatre for Children Festival’11’
Ranga Shankara, Bangalore
July 2011
Using storytelling, puppetry, animation and the grid-technique to let stories emerge from the children. A projector was used to trace out the children’s animated images and then, it was painted on layer by layer.
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