The therapy of art in Melville
How can art therapy benefit someone? The paper sits down with an art therapy masters student to find out.
The Northcliff Melville Times recently spent some time at The Melville Mud Room and met up with sisters, Kate and Nina Shand.
Currently doing her masters in art therapy at the University of Johannesburg, Kate forms part of the first cohort of students this qualification has been made available for in South Africa. Though the country does have some art therapists, Kate explained they had all been trained overseas.
She sat down with the paper in her studio and shared the benefits of art therapy and how, in a society like ours, this form of therapy is just what it needs. From the start, Kate knew she wanted to use art as a way to not only get to know herself better, but as a means to help others do the same too.
For her, art therapy is important as it is about play, curiosity, symbol formation, and creating images – which everyone can do. She described art therapy as being the same as talk therapy – the only difference is the third person in the room, in the form of the art that is being made.
In her opinion, art is not only soothing, it can help get to the core of what someone might be facing quicker like when an image is put in front of them. “It’s a way to connect with parts of yourself that you have forgotten about and when the image is in front of you, it is much easier to talk about.”
The Melville resident is also trained as a community art counsellor with Lefika La Phodiso. The non-profit organisation is said to offer community art counselling, training and a variety of arts-based programmes for children. This organisation allows for group work to be done and, as Shand put it, “We do not have the resources and capacity in this country and most people do not have the resources to work individually with a therapist.”
Through this organisation, she helps train community art counsellors, who are mostly people who are already working within the community such as teachers and psychologists, or artists who want to work slightly differently.
Out of all the art materials, clay speaks to her, “It is very elemental and there is an ancient memory to it. When we were kids we played with mud, making mud pies.”
Kate said clay has aided in her revealing parts of herself to herself, “It has shown me how impatient I am and you cannot hide from yourself once you work with clay. It also shows you what mood you are in.”
She has found that it is not only what is revealed through the making of an image but the conversation that happens in the process of making this image as it goes so much deeper. One cannot avoid what you see emerging – something from within is put out there.
Her sister Nina has been a potter for 25 years. Together they bring their two very different qualities to their studio. There, she has seen people be willing to explore and experiment and slow down from the fast-paced environment.
Shand loves that people who find their way to the studio are mostly locals, which adds to the sense of community shared.
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