Editorial – Lost and found

Sheridan Linnell

Am I navigating correctly? Tell me,

Which stars were my ancestors looking at?

And which ones burnt the black of searching irises

and reflected something genuine back?

… Tell me, am I navigating correctly? The sea

our ancestors traversed stretches out farther than the stars.

– Tayi Tibble, Identity politics

What is perhaps most at issue, in this second issue of JoCAT for 2024, is how, as a vibrant, diverse and growing community of creative arts therapy practitioners, researchers, educators and trainees, we keep critical and creative conversations alive. JoCAT's increasingly popular podcasts – this time it is Owen Bullock’s kōrero [conversation] with Deborah Green and Rupa Parthasarathy’s with Ying Wang – offer audiences a window on such conversations, anticipating or responding to written and visual contributions.

Jan McConnell and Marcia Underwood offer a timely reminder in their research paper that “[d]ecolonising frameworks can be viewed as a tool to combat ableism (Cyrus, 2017; Lechene, 2024; Shaw et al., 2022) and are an important consideration when seeking genuine co-creation”.

The work of Mauri Tui Tuia Creative Therapies is an embodiment of ‘whānau [families] leading the way’. Whakawhanaungatanga [to build relationships] and weaving connections are crucial when it comes to CAT with rangatahi [young people] who are differently abled and the caregivers who love, consult with and sustain them including a wider circle of whānau, teachers and therapists. A literal and metaphorical doorway connects the spaces in which mothers can be nourished so that their young men can flourish. They begin and come back together as whanau. The notion of non-binary, non-hierarchical collaboration between related and distinct contributors also extends into a collaboration of Māori and Western world views and pedagogies; into a interchange that respects the wisdom of elders while listening deeply to those who are young, into creative collaboration with diverse materials and processes and the therapeutic interplay and flow between art-making, music and dance/movement.

Rupa Parthasarathy, a recipient of the ANZACATA JoCAT Author Support Bursary for new and diverse authors, weaves a story of emerging professional identity and practice in which art therapy theories, spaces and materialities are the warp and complex intersectionalities of culture, family and biography are the weave. Marked by the experience of being a South Indian woman of colour in the predominantly white space of art therapy education, Parthasarathy has established Mindkshetra as a sacred space (kshetra) where creativity and diversity can flourish and heart-minds are nourished.

Bernice Lin and Victoria Ng pick up the theme of intersectionality in their account of a community arts event celebrating Singaporean independence that exceeds the official discourse of nation-building – engendering a heightened sense of intersectional belonging and cross-cultural understanding among diverse participants in a public workshop.

Addressing the marginalised area of how International students from Asia negotiate arts therapy training, Berlinda Yi Ling Tan and Katherine Winlaw describe a process of expressing and containing the psychosocial stressors of this experience through the medium of clay – a carefully constructed heuristic enquiry with a beneficial influence on student well-being. Also investigating an aspect of the student experience, Athena Lucas looks back on how she adapted Judith Rubin’s practice framework to an online placement context and the role of reflective artmaking in supporting Lucas’ professional development.

Kiki Kavos offers a reappraisal of the 2006 graphic novel Dragon Slippers and Jan Allen reviews The Anxiety Project exhibition. These contributions each foreground the voices and images of those best placed to bring the expertise attendant on lived experience into focus, while Tamar Torrance’s review of the New York Times bestseller Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us demonstrates how scientific support for what CAT practitioners know about the powers of creativity has strongly entered popular discourse.

Drawing on her recently completed doctoral research, Amanda Woodford offers an introduction to creative arts therapies as an ethical and embodied pathway to enhancing quality of life for those living with chronic pain. Woodford’s attentiveness to how we language pain in ways that neither pathologise nor diminish the experience is exemplary.

Naomi Pears-Scown’s explainer on poetic enquiry continues this thread of concern with the material powers of language. As Pears-Scown so eloquently shows, poetic enquiry is a potent means to explore the unthought edges of experience and render into vivid relief the agency of words – in her own research article elucidating the power of clinical discourse as it sits in tension with creative<–>arts<–>therapies; in Jaya Narayan’s bold declaration of love through poetry and collage; and as an introduction to the artistry of Owen Bullock, whose words, in the context of mentoring Australian Defence Force (ADF) members recovering from trauma, form a suspension bridge across the gap between lost and found, transporting us to that place where

…being is a blue hoverfly, just above the surface of the shining stream

– Owen Bullock, Art in November