We write this on Kabi Kabi country in Australia, land that has never been ceded, and Ōtautahi Christchurch in Aotearoa New Zealand. We wish to offer respect to elders past, present and emerging, and to acknowledge the mana and rangatiratanga of Ngāi Tahu.

Working from different countries, New Zealand and Australia, we begin this editorial by way of some email conversations. Floating ideas and impressions back and forth across the Tasman, a way into co-creating this edition’s editorial slowly opens before us.

Deborah: Many of us working as creative arts therapists in Australia, Asia and Aotearoa have spent yet another year watching from within lockdown as the rough nails of Covid-19, climate change and conflict have pried up the corners of our worlds. I carry the disconnect, the uncertainty, and the anxiety bred from this into a ramshackle forage and fossick through the works to be published in this edition of JoCAT – the second in 2021. I’ve been trying to get a feel for what seems quite elusive within this collection of articles, creatives and reviews… and I’m wondering if my muddle-headedness is a symptom of the pervasive exhaustion that seems to be infusing us all. Stacey and I confer…

Stacey: I admit I am still bubbling here, moving slowly, trying to find a way to crystallise what I am thinking/feeling about the bigger/broader themes that seem to be calling. Deb, you seem to be doing the same… this is taking a bit of processing. It has been a long year, indeed a long two years, in which we have all had to adapt to new ways of being with each other. It strikes me that it is precisely the how of being with each other and being with ourselves on which the works contributed for this edition are focused. And, in each contribution, the arts are foregrounded as playing a central role in this how.

Deborah: I, too, am noticing a whispering thread lacing through the works… As you’ve observed, Stacey, there is a writing and creating into the central role of the arts in ‘the how of being with each other and being with ourselves’. All of the scholartists (Cahnmann-Taylor, 2017) contemplate this how from within various distinct but overlapping locations. Wong leans inquisitively into Heidegger’s Dasein or “being-in-the-world” [1] which resonates with Tapper’s “worlding” [2] and Lay, Baraba and Khoo’s “inter-being”. Khoo engages authentically and reflexively with herself using response art, while Jewell and Camden-Pratt’s PATh-creating “practice of freedom” requires active allies...

Stacey: And connected to the how of being is the how of knowing. The work that this edition has attracted shares a foregrounding of the powerful role the arts holds as a means to express, explore and reflect on our living experiencing as therapeutic arts practitioners toward new knowing. Highlighted is the value of staying with the practice of reflective reflexive exploration using the arts, to both maintain our own well-being within, and support the development of our practice as creative arts therapists, peer workers and researchers. Commitment to reflective reflexive creative exploration is a process that ongoingly works to clarify what is meaningful towards knowledge co-creation. By making visible and valuing the emergent process of creative exploration and inquiry, alongside theory and findings, the relational nature of engagements with art materials, artworks, others, the world is made explicit – process becomes content. The relational being in living experiencing with others is a space of becoming together, a space where binaries can be disrupted. Within these spaces the arts provide a means to gain understanding, an approach to knowledge formation/co-creation as we interrogate ‘this thing we do’.

‘This thing we do’ is explored in many ways throughout the contributions to this edition, highlighting ‘the how of being with each other and ourselves’. We continue floating ideas and impressions back and forth across the Tasman, to offer a taste of each of the articles.

Deborah: I’m drawn to Jewell and Camden-Pratt’s call to join in critically questioning the discourses that shape arts therapy and arts therapy education. They call for these to be a “‘practice of freedom’ (hooks, 1994, p.21)” that “cannot and should not be done alone. It requires active allies” to support “stepping forward” and locating peer art therapists as essential within the art therapy profession.

Stacey: Yes, and in this Jewel and Camden-Pratt provide a much-needed background on the uprising of peer art therapy work. They advocate for therapist Lived Experience, “I have lived this”, as a key and valued resource for peer art therapists, where ongoing rigorous and well-supported personal reflection and reflexivity is a core requirement. Transparency, open disclosure, and active demonstration of well-being strategies and survival are vital. They advocate for a profession where open disclosure of Lived Experience and diagnoses is actively valued and no longer marginalised.

Stacey: Wong speaks to “active being” in mutual processes of interaction within a therapeutic relationship by way of reflexive exploration of her practice. She explores the mutual co-constructed intersubjective process within relational intersubjective spaces between herself as therapist and a young client. Within these spaces the arts facilitate connection towards deeper, more nuanced understandings.

Deborah: When I return to the metaphor I’ve borrowed from Jewell and Camden-Pratt, I experience Wong’s phenomenological “stepping forward” as she tracks her engagement with a traumatised child, where she maps how the therapist and client mutually influence “one another from moment to moment”. This form of relational and interconnected ‘inter-being’ calls for the therapist to be internally and externally active in their interactions.

Stacey: Tapper explores what happens at the “confluence of arts and self”. She highlights the generative and emergent nature of the arts as she explores ways to invite relationality, open towards otherness, and reconsider how we know. She asks: How do we do arts based reflexivity, arts-based research? This is answered by way of bringing us into her process of creating and actively engaging with a series of paintings. Tapper paints herself into knowing as she refreshingly asserts that “we are the living data.”

Deborah: For me, Tapper does not so much ‘step forward’ as dance forward, charting “a series of unexpected arrivals: an uninvited guest, a soul-filled sky, and universes beneath my toes”, which allow for her “relational re-enworlding through poiesis.” She shifts our curiosity and attention to “the edge, the unknown, the unfolding through the arts within research which may offer tangible sympoietic experiences: of relationality, interconnection and entanglement”.

Stacey: Khoo writes of response art as an outlet to express and contain her lockdown experiencing of disconnection, isolation and stress. She demonstrates how using arts to respond to living experiencing can support self-care and reflection, and be a tool for practice.

Deborah: ‘Stepping forward’ for Khoo happens through proactive use of response art within a lockdown experience that evoked anxiety, uncertainty and loneliness. She maps a process in which response art-making became “an outlet to express challenges, vulnerabilities and resistance”, opening a process that she suggests “increases the ability to form an authentic and therapeutic relationship with self and others”.

Stacey: Lay, Baraba and Khoo speak of the centrality of art as process and container of individual expression. They present experiences of creating Inter-being, a final-year exhibition of student-therapist work. The students’ work explores identity as a therapist and art as reflective practice that supports regulation, self-care, expression and interconnectedness.

Deborah: Yes, Lay, Baraba and Khoo ‘step forward’ through their group exhibition, Inter-being, to affirm the art in art therapy. They write into and acknowledge the collective growth and connectedness contributing to their “unique identity as art therapists who use creative and expressive means as part of [their] professional discipline”.

And now we step back and respond creatively to the experience of engaging with these works.