My journey with art therapy began in 2010 after the major natural disaster (earthquake) in Christchurch, New Zealand, where my husband and I were living at the time. Seven years we struggled with an unresolved insurance claim, along with many thousands of other people in Christchurch.
I discovered the power of art therapy first hand. Art became a ‘coping’ mechanism during that long struggle. It takes incredible strength and determination and a survival strategy to get through such a long, arduous and slow process. So what was it that kept me going? In the down times while I was waiting for things to happen, to progress – I simply had to find ways of distracting myself – distracting my mind from going round and round in circles, keeping me awake at night, leaving me in a permanent state of anxiety and negativity. Miraculously though, in my distress, my body seemed to know what to do, seemed to know how to find a way of coping. I found myself furiously creating.
So what did I make? I created handmade fabric ‘hope boxes’ and the space around me slowly filled with my ‘hope’ boxes. These boxes represented for me, at that time, my ability to compartmentalize. A place of storage for my ‘resilience’. While I painted, stitched and sewed, my mind calmed, my thoughts focused on what I was doing and the disruptive world of unresolved insurance claims disappeared for the time I was creating. I made artistic representations of the Canterbury Cathedral, of the Cardboard Cathedral, square shapes, hexagonal shapes, pyramids and the list goes on – items that were so removed from the world I then inhabited. These items of colour and texture brought me inner peace, stillness, solace and great hope – hope that one day the situation I was in would be resolved and that I would be able to move on with my life.
In the process of the creation of art I was able to momentarily master, tolerate and minimize the conflict and stress. A healthy form of self distraction. My art work became prolific. Art therapy is a well known methodology for coping with stress. But my art sprang from no intellectualizing on the matter. Rather it was more of an unconscious process – it was my physical self’s way of surviving, of protecting my mental self. And no matter how much energy I put into expressing my anger and sadness about the failure of the insurance industry and about what transpired in the City over those years into my art – I could not – my creations remained items of joy and beauty (in my eyes).
In that beauty – came healing. A way of overcoming the terrible dualism in what was a very painful process. It was a way of obliterating the negativity and darkness I experienced throughout those years. I was surprised and amazed by my own output. It flowed through me and out of my fingers. Creation after creation after creation… And I am sure that it was no accident that so much art appeared in Christchurch City after the earthquakes – all expressions of people coping in whatever way they could – and what a wonderful way to cope.
