GALLERY |
The Work of Our Members | |
Selected modalities are featured below. |
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ACATA Conference 2007 | |
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Committee | |
Click on a thumbnails below.
All images in the gallery remain the property of the artist.
Welcome to the ACATA Website Gallery
The Work of Our Members |
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| Teachers Conference - Carolyn-Noel | ||
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These images were taken at a recent conference for teachers that I attended and was privileged to be invited to facilitate two workshops. These photos are of participants engaged in a group process workshop. Attendees are given the opportunity to experience and explore their feelings of working with in a group. Not only do people get a lot out of discovering how they 'fit' with in a group there is nearly always a terrific product as a result of working in this way!!!
The other workshop was about helping teachers to find new and innovative ways to teach English as a second language. I did a presentation about how to teach emotive language!!!
| Individual paintings | ||
A survivor of childhood trauma talks about her experience of art therapy. |
"I cannot imagine being able to heal from childhood trauma and abuse without the aid of art therapy. I'm not sure that I would have made it. About three months into very difficult and painful psychotherapy, I went to see "The Player" with Tim Robbins and Greta Scacchi. Greta Scacchi plays an artist whose room is filled with her own paintings which are on a single theme - bluey-white ice. I didn't think much about it, but my husband wanted to see the film the next day! So I went again, and enjoyed it just as much the second time. But when it came to the scene with Scacchi and Robbins in her artist's studio, suddenly I ceased to hear the dialogue. It was as if the sound button had been turned down, and I entered into the world of the paintings. I looked and looked, totally transfixed, and the words came into my head : I want to paint, like her.
That moment transformed my therapy process, for the traumatic material that I could not express in any verbal way began to pour out through the art. What I could not say, I could paint. It was as if the movement of my arm and hand, and the gaze of my eyes bypassed the language centre, and bypassed the barriers and controls my defense system had put up against the unbearable pain of what had been done to me.
I would often create paintings in pairs. The first one would be cathartic, painful and confronting, and then without thinking about it, I would make a second painting that was happy and beautiful. It was as if I was both rewarding myself for my achievement and courage, and giving myself some pleasure and comfort.
My personal experience of art therapy is that its great value is in the actual process of making the picture, and the sharing of it with another, as long as the therapist does not try to impose her/his own interpretation on my felt sense of what it means for me.
I simply have no words to adequately convey how valuable creative expression is, for people struggling to heal and transform their lives. It is the other half of therapy, complemented by talking and sharing. For people with backgrounds like mine, talking by itself is usually not enough."
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| Theme Doors | ||
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| Dance | ||
Reflections After A Dance Therapy Session Heidi Ch'ng |
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Your lives lived,
now living inside your hearts,
and the echoes of your
prime-times
whisper,
treading on tippy-toes
watching out for triggers,
of what may not be known.
My youthful skin feels supple,
yet simple,
I wonder if I can hold
your complexities,
of buried energies and lost worlds?
The sadness stenches through the hallway,
yet I pursue what I think I know is there,
I just don't know what
the right thing is,
in each moment.
I take a guess,
and hope that somewhere, somehow,
it means a little to you.
La Mariposa - the Butterfly Woman
Hippo gliding in water
Free from gravity
When I dance I feel my gravitas falling away
My legs feel disconnected
From their seriousness
My waist bends as if it longer has to
Carry all the burdens of my tasks
My arms are like butterflies
And my fingers speak in a succulent language
All their own
My head faces upward
And my eyes no longer see this world
They see a world of waves and arcs
And parabolas
And concentric circles
All filled in
with the momentum of dance.
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| Top Row: Belinda Cody, Adrian Harris, Carla van Laar, Zoe West, Helen Sawyer, Amanda Hansen, Sherridan Maxwell, Nette Frost. Bottom Row: Pierrette Boustany, Dianne Mentis, Vivienne Howson, Lee Agius-Roberts |
