Finding our way
Using creativity to make our own maps
(and our hearts as a compass)
Art Therapy as Creative Cartography
Jules Booth
Registered Art Therapist (AThR)
’Creative Cartographer’
“I trained at art school in my early 20s, but it wasn’t until I participated in creative therapies in my middle age, that I developed a connection with creativity that was personally meaningful.
I didn’t know it at the time, but I was beginning a creative wayfinding process. By creating sand trays (in Sandplay), drawings, sculptures and assemblages of found objects, I began to chart my inner landscape (the mountains, the ravines, the seas, the fields…). These artworks became my creative maps and helped me begin to orientate myself within my own life and also locate myself on my own life path.
My own positive experiences as a creative cartographer motivated me to train as an art therapist and support other people to develop their own relationships with creativity, and begin to find themselves and their own ways.”
— Jules Booth
Become a creative cartographer
Inwardly, our lives are rich with sensations, feelings, metaphors and imagery. Art therapy offers us opportunities to express our inner richness. What we create we can think of as maps, representations of inner places.
Over time, we can chart more and more inner places and start to build up the makings of our own atlas. Maps in hand (atlas in the making), we can travel in life with increasing ease and sense of direction.
Becoming a creative cartographer, we begin to know ourselves and start to navigate our lives with choice and intention.
Your own, unique creativity
When working with art and creativity therapeutically, we recognise that each and every one of us has the capacity to be creative. We orientate ourselves towards our own, unique creativity.
For these reasons, art and creative therapies are suitable for all people who would like to experience them, no matter what their previous art making experience.