ART THERAPIST SESSION

AVRIL NEAGLE

On the second day of Unit X Avril Neagle, an art therapist came in to do a talk about art therapy and how art helps some children/adults relieve themselves of stress and trauma. 

Art Therapy first started in 1940's. It is a way of using art to communicate and express our feelings. It is mainly used on children and people in adolescence. Art Therapy is very often used as a last resort of treatment when it is argued it should ideally be the first. 

In the first part of this session Avril told the group general information about art therapy. 

(Images above) Notes from the art therapy session.

Workshop

In the first workshop we were given 7-10mins to draw what was written on the paper. 

(Images above) These images show the pictures that the whole group drew. In the bottom image I have outlined the pictures that I had drawn. 

1. Sun  2. Moon  3. Tree  4. What We Like

After we had done the drawings we all took some time to look at them all and share our thoughts on the drawings and how we felt about them.

During this workshop I realised there was a subtle difference in everyones drawings although we were told to draw the same thing. I think the drawings were a visual way of showing that everyone has different ways of thinking and this ties in with what Avril had said that different people see or do things sometimes based on their past life experiences.

In the second session Avril spoke to us about expressions and language. Non verbal expression usually comes before verbal language. This suggests that when we are young we show what we would like rather than say because we wouldn't know how to. 

We also learnt about Emotional Literacy which is when they do a test and access where somebody is in terms of emotion based on the score.

Activity

In this activity Avril had told us that she way going to draw something on the paper and we as a group had to shout out what we thought she was drawing while she was drawing it. We came up with some interesting guesses as shown in the list below. In the end the drawing was of a dog. We then had to decide how the dog may be based on how it looks so we decided that it was a she, it was playful and it probably comes from a good home where it is loved. 

(Image above) What Avril had drawn and a list of what we thought she was drawing and diagram.

Overall, this talk by Avril gave me the opportunity to find out more about art therapy. I actually really enjoyed this workshop and all the tasks. I felt very happy and light afterwards and I actually quite enjoyed making art that wasn't to one theme for once because usually we are stuck with one theme for a while, I thought these tasks were really light and fun to do with the group. The aspect that I liked the most about this workshop was that after each activity we would have a discussion/evaluate what we had done and sort of gather our thoughts on what we just did.