Art Therapy
Using creativity as a tool to explore and map our inner worlds
Art therapy with children and adolescents
While we all have the capacity to use creative processes therapeutically, young people do this naturally. For them, creativity and imaginative play are innate ways to explore and make sense of themselves and the world around them. While talk therapies can sometimes feel unfamiliar or uncomfortable, creative approaches often feel more natural, safe, and engaging.
I work with children from 7 years of age through to adolescence, using a child-centred and non-directive approach. This means the young person leads the therapeutic process at their own pace.
With an attentive and caring presence, I create the conditions for them to express themselves freely. By holding space with calm awareness, I support the natural unfolding of their inner processes, allowing room for growth, insight, and change.
Children and young people inherently use creativity as a means of expression, learning, healing, and meaning-making. In art therapy, I honour and support this natural capacity by offering a safe, responsive environment where they can engage with their inner world through creative exploration.
Art therapy with adults
Working creatively in art therapy is like being a creative cartographer. While traditional cartographers map the outer world, creative cartographers map inner worlds. To do this, they listen inwardly to create something that comes from inside. What they create can be thought of as a map: a representation of an inner place.
We all have rich and diverse inner terrain that deserves our awareness and presence. This makes creative cartography important and exciting work. However, the work can also feel daunting. Reassuringly, all we need to do is take one step at a time—learning to listen to ourselves and finding our own sense of direction along the way.
So, how do we start? In an art therapy session, we begin where you are. Our lives are full of sensations, feelings, metaphors, and imagery. With an open invitation to create using the materials in my art studio, all these aspects of your experience can find their way into your creative work and become doorways to the places you want to explore.
You might choose to create with clay, collage materials, natural materials, found objects, fibres, fabrics, or painting and drawing materials. I will support you in choosing the materials you're drawn to and creating something meaningful. Art therapy is different from art-making in other settings. In art therapy, we orient inward—toward our own unique creativity—rather than focusing on external expectations (such as someone else’s idea of artistic skill, for example). As you work creatively to explore your world, I will travel alongside you, moved by my belief in you. Along the way, I hope to help you reach previously uncharted places.
As a participant in creative therapies myself, I have experienced safe therapeutic relationships that allowed me to be more open and curious about who I am. I have mapped this more open and curious place for myself, and I offer the feeling of this place back to you as you begin your own exploration.
As we travel, we will look for new places that hold the potential for you to make more deliberate and meaningful decisions. These spaces are vital for all of us—places where we can stand in our own balance and decide how and where to step next. Over time, as you creatively chart more and more of your inner world, you will begin to build the makings of your own atlas. With your maps in hand—your atlas in the making—you may begin to travel through life with greater ease and a deeper sense of direction.