Editorial – Colours joining on the canvas

Sheridan Linnell

I have borrowed from Kathrin Mark’s contemplative journal for the title of this introduction to the second issue of JoCAT for 2023:

Colours joining on the canvas…
Inviting
A pause
A breath

It is good to take pause, at the end of a year marked across the globe and within the ANZACATA region by turmoil and tragedy, and to breathe in just some of colours that make up the canvas of art therapy and flow into this issue of the journal.

Writing across scholarly genres from her experience of visual journaling during treatment and recovery for breast cancer, Katherine Winslaw reminds us how

there is another voice that needs to be heard in such trying times.

This voice might have a wide historical reach or might whisper intimately to the singularity of an experience that resonates with others. Winslow’s own voice is amplified in her podcast conversation with Amanda Levey.

Mandy Jay engages with one of the most central, and yet marginalised, topics for our profession in her scholarly essay on spiritual care in art therapy. Sarah Brown’s sparkling, cratered sculpture of a head embodies the trauma of and slow healing from brain surgery for epilepsy. Susannah Morrison conducts an arts-informed enquiry, into the redoubling of grief when an ectopic pregnancy is not afforded the same recognition of profound loss as other maternal bereavements. (Elsewhere in this JoCAT, Morrison draws on neuroscience and narrative practices of externalisation to shape a short creative fable about Fear.)

Writing in the genre of the practice paper, Celeste Choo knits together psychodynamic theory and insights from her intersubjective practice as a trainee art therapist. Donna Hedström Gold explores the role of the exhibition in fostering the artist within the art therapist and contributing to the landscape of collective self-care.

This issue of JoCAT again touches on the relevance of new materialism for the theorisation of creative arts therapies. Michele Fairbairn reaches beyond the confines of the human to engage us in reciprocal dialogue with a single leaf of a Monstera plant. In an exploratory article supported by a podcast, Virginia Frankovich draws on two major contemporary influences that do not always seem compatible - new materialism and neuroscience – bringing them together with earlier frameworks whereby arts therapists have foregrounded the quality and agency of particular materials. She works in cooperation with the materiality of food and fine art, crossing barriers of sight and sound with fellow creative arts therapy trainees Sarah Wilson and Julian Chote, and guided by kōrero with Heleina Waimoana Dalton.

In our last ‘drop’ for 2023, Pallavi Chander, Evan Hastings, Geet (Sangeeta Goel), Shravanthi Ventakesh and Nidhi Khurana transport us, through the language of sensation and a decolonial ethos grounded in the principle of ‘nothing about us without us’:

Under metro station pillars, there is an arrhythmic sensuous treat of fragrant heaps of flowers, ripened fruits and soppu (leafy greens) where the calls from the rickety vendor carts are overpowered by the reverberating sound play of heavy traffic and loudspeakers chanting bells from the century-old temple.

Ariel Moy eloquently introduces us to many past and current creative contributions that there is not space to consider here. Among them, with the lightest of touches, arts therapy elder Jan Allen reorients us to mystery. So, as the year turns:

it’s the ocean’s edge of blue
at the horizon
that becomes present
in the room