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Occupational Therapy and Arts Therapies

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://eresearch.qmu.ac.uk/handle/20.500.12289/25

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Subject: search.filters.subject.Art Therapy

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    Creative arts as self-care: vicarious trauma, resilience and the trainee art therapist
    (Informa UK Limited, 2024-03-20) Ortner, Dayna
    Background Research shows that indirect trauma can negatively affect professionals in helping professions, with students and young professionals at greater risk, particularly if they have a personal history of trauma. Research suggests that engaging in the creative arts may help professionals process vicarious trauma and promote resilience. Context This paper explores the use of creative arts practice for self-care by an art therapy trainee with lived experience of somatic disorder symptoms and complex post-traumatic stress disorder (C-PTSD), working in a secure setting. Approach Using a trauma lens, the paper discusses how the creative arts can ameliorate the effects of indirect trauma when working as a trainee art therapist in a challenging context. The trainee’s early life experiences elucidate the challenges of countertransference and trauma. The creative arts process supports the reflexive skills an art therapist uses for effective practice. Outcomes The creative arts as a self-care practice supported the trainee art therapist to negotiate her dissociative defence style. It was an effective tool for managing the ill-effects of exposure to trauma, including somatic symptoms, and benefited the trainee’s development. Conclusions The creative arts helped the trainee to reconnect with her body and emotions, and subsequently benefited her clinical thinking.
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    Tropical Path (Part 2): The Life and Work of Antonia Eiríz
    (University of London, 2010) Hills de Zárate, Margaret
    The second part of this extended paper traces the life and work of the Cuban artist Antonia Eiríz Vásquez from 1968 (when she stopped painting) to 1993; when she left Cuba for Miami where she died in 1995. Drawing upon archival materials and interviews, her involvement with Arte popular and specifically one aspect of it, papier mache, is described. Her activity in this area is contextualized with reference to the political and economic climate of the period and with reference to the support and recognition this work received from the Cuban establishment. It is proposed that her involvement with Arte popular does not represent a complete break with her previous artistic, social and political concerns but rather provided a different route for their expression. As such, it is suggested that her innovative work in establishing Arte popular constitutes an example of cultural democracy which in turn provided the backdrop to the development of art therapy practices in Cuba and that this by implication positions her as a 'forerunner' of Cuban art therapy. The term 'forerunner' is used here as it is employed Ben-David and Collins (1966) and latterly by Waller, (1991) and Gilroy (2006) to describe how a profession develops from the interests of a few people, the 'forerunners', who pave the way for a 'new idea' to emerge. This 'new idea' or path is developed by others who establish an 'interest group' and so 'found' a discipline; the 'founders' then teach the 'followers'.