Quake destruction / arts creation: arts therapy & the Canterbury earthquakes

Abstract

This arts-based inquiry explores my experiences as beginning arts therapist during the Canterbury, New Zealand, earthquakes from 2010 to 2014. At the heart of these experiences lies my challenging dual-role as both quake-survivor and therapist – I was betwixt-and-between quake-destruction and arts-creation. I aimed to make sens/e of this in ways that may be useful to applied-arts practitioners working in similar contexts. My sens/e-making quest blended autoethnography, a/r/tography and arts therapy-as-research. This braided-methodology created a multi-faceted process: I adopted Victor Turner’s concept of liminality as my central metaphor to give theoretical and aesthetic containment. Liminality resonated with my earthquake experiences, my practice-as-therapist and this arts-based research. I teased-open the term sens/e. I used my physical-senses to generate embodiment. I befriended my implicit felt-sense and evoked my soul-sense. Drawing on the French sens for direction, I embraced therapy and research as creating life-forward direction. And I used these sens/ual processes to make meaning and render new knowledge. I created mixed-modal artworks to explore my memories, writings, artworks and photographs as quake-survivor/therapist. I opened reflexive conversations between my creations and texts addressing arts-based research, trauma, liminality, and therapy. I enacted this study via three roles inspired by Rita Irwin’s a/r/tography: As artist, I created art using my quake-arts therapy-process of ‘dropping-in’ which splices Laury Rappaport’s Focusing-Orientated Art Therapy with Shaun McNiff’s images-as-angels process. These creations expressed who I perceived I was, who I currently am, and who I am becoming as artist/researcher/therapist. As researcher, I followed McNiff’s suggestion to craft correspondence between my research process and practice of therapy. My dropping-in process, when combined with autoethnographic a/r/tography, provided a practical way to generate, gather and analyse research material. As therapist, I discovered – via personal experience of wounding/healing, and hands-on implementation of therapy for others suffering – my quake-work had stumbled upon several notions congruent with current intersubjective and embodied arts- and trauma-therapy, exemplified in Stephen Levine’s poietic approach. The outcome is an arts-rich multi-vocal layered-account containing emergent findings regarding: post-postmodern both-and-and…soul-based arts therapy and research approaches applicable to contexts of enduring liminality, in which imagical play invites new order to emerge from chaos, healing is reclaimed within the wounded/healer archetype, and internal communitas becomes a figural intention of trauma-transformation.