I have been involved with teaching on the Art Therapy Northern Programme for a number of years – as core lecturer from 2006-2012 and subsequently as Associate Lecturer.

Presenting aspects of my Ph.D. over recent years (in person and online) I build on research in the area of ‘response art’ as part of reflective practice, as well as affective methodologies that draw on subjective experience and partial, situated, perspectives.

Shifting the emphasis from reflection to reflexivity I argue for the embodied, sensory, performative, ‘work’ of art as material with and through which to affectively feel one’s way into human experiences and situations’ – processes that are at the root of the profession.

Acknowledging the complexities and pressures on time, space, and resources, as a site of imaginative encounter and performative enactment through which one may be pressed to notice and feel more acutely, the value of the method presented here lies in its potential to engage our imaginative, emotional, ethical, thinking bodies in ways that might not arise through more traditional approaches to reflexive practice.

For more information about Art Therapy see The British Association of Art Therapists website.