As most of you will know, over the last two and a bit years I have been engrossed in a research project as part of my Masters in Experiential and Creative Arts Practice at the MIECAT Insitute. I have just completed the thesis (more about this is the next post.)

One of the key methodological approaches and themes in the project was using the arts to respond to the data and to the research participants. This was informed predominantly by the work of the MIECAT Institute founder, Warren Lett and his development of Intersubjective Responding in the therapeutic context.

For me, the MIECAT form of inquiry has opened up a whole new way of making art with and in response to others. This is an excerpt form my thesis, direct citations are in italics (see Garden-Thompson, 2014, pp. 22-33):

“The MIECAT procedure of intersubjective responding was pivotal in the collaborative companioning sessions. Intersubjectivity is based on an existential-phenomenological tradition in psychotherapy. The focus is on “being with” the client in the present moment, on bringing together the “story” which is told by the client and the content that emerges from the therapeutic relationship.

The therapist in this mode of being is thus responsible for participating in story-telling in a way that has both freedoms and limits. The flights of imaginative possibilities require a form that binds the central experiential issues the client has expressed (Todres, 2007, p. 87).

Intersubjective responding has unshackled me from the role of “expert” and placed me in the role of collaborator — enabling me to respond using the same medium the participants used in representing their experiences. Dr. Warren Lett, the founding member of MIECAT, developed the procedure as a way for therapists to utilise their creativity in the therapeutic relationship. He describes it as a phenomenological alternative to diagnosis in the form of an artistic representation of what the companion has felt, understood and responded to, in the other’s story. For Lett (1997), it is also a collaboration that says, “I think this is what I heard you say” (p. 18). He further describes how:

The quality of the intersubjective response lies between the pre-reflective and the conscious awareness of emergent possibilities. Some such responses are reflective and considered, whilst others are spontaneous and intuitive; but however they are formed, they are delivered as a felt resonance to the form of the interaction that lies between             participants (p. 278).

Like a conversation, art presents an interactive picture — an interaction between what is remembered, the art materials and the content-in-process arising in the therapeutic relationship.

As in a conversation between people, what is made has come from the between, rather than just from the ‘inside’ of the artist, or a representation of the world out there, and has taken place over time in its own rhythm, like the verbal conversation between members of the group (Skaife, 2001, pp. 47 – 48).

Although there are risks involved in responding to others in this way, I am reassured by Thornburn and Hibbard (2008) who say “we may never really know at all if our response is appropriate — we simply enter into the phenomenological stream of emergent material that is gathered around the individual’s experience and use an expressive modality to externally represent it” (p. 155).

Not only has this approach informed my research but also my practice as a visual artist and creative arts therapist. Last year when working as a Creative Arts Therapist in Supported Residential Services, I ran pop-up “Open Studios”. It was an opportunity for residents of the services to participate in art making using a range of processes and materials. Most of the participants developed to a point that they could initiate their own art making and for those that needed encouragement I often made art alongside them. At times I we worked collaboratively on the same image…a conversation without words but through art. Here are some of those images:

I sewed the cut outs onto material. It was slow and focused process, giving me lots of time to reflect on the moments shared when I had originally made the artworks.

The apron now hangs on my wall as a celebration and reminder of the power of the arts and the potential for incorporating Intersubjective Responding in my practice.

Natalya Garden, 2013, The apron, paint, pastel, pencil, curtain material, thread, ribbon

References:

Garden-Thompson, N. (2014). Life After Arts School: An Inquiry into Fine & Visual Art Graduates’ Experiences of Creative Stuckness. Melbourne, Victoria: The MIECAT Institute.

Lett, W. (1997). How the Arts Make a Difference in Therapy (pp. 10-23). Melbourne, Victoria: Australian Dance Council.

Skaife, S. (2001). Making Visible: Art Therapy and Intersubjectivity, Inscape: Formerly Inscape, 6(2), 40-50. doi: 10.1080/17454830108414030

Thorburn, K., & Hibbard, S. (2008). Multimodal conversations – methods for shared  moments of meaning with vulnerable young people. In P. Liamputtong & J. Rumbold (Eds.), Knowing differently arts-based and collaborative research methods (pp. 141 – 166). New York: Nova Science Publishers Inc.

Todres, L. (2007). Embodied Enquiry: Phenomenological Touchstones for Research, Psychotherapy and Spirituality. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.