Art share: Reaction to trauma lecture

For the second half of last week’s trauma lecture, I began playing with the colored clay, not really thinking about what I was creating but nonetheless, creating something very relevant to the subject matter. I began by creating thin red tubes that I ended up creating a basket with. I then began to fill the basket with little brown balls. When I took a step back from the basket I noticed that I had created a basket with balls of human feces. I ended up adding blades of grass growing in the basket and in the environment right beside the basket. What I created felt very relevant to my feelings about the potential of art therapy in the context of trauma. The red basket — which in my mind was a symbol of the possibility of art therapy — was a container for the feces. In other words art therapy offered the traumatized client a safe place to release the stored up trauma (stuck in the unconscious). The blades of grass symbolized the possibility for new life to grow from such trauma.