Creative Arts Therapy

I have known the healing power of creation.

A camera was put in my hands as a teenager; seemingly saying “show us how you see things.” It never occurred to me before then that what I saw -what I thought- mattered. Holding my camera, my life was transformed. I had a way, all on my own, to transcend the situations of my young life. As I grew older and experienced the world, I found creating art was a way to speak, and sometimes it was the only way I could. Words would fail, but art always seemed to get to the truth of the matter.

In 2010 I earned a bachelor’s degree in studio art from the University of Alabama in Huntsville. While completing my degree I knew I wanted to use art as a connecting point for people, but I did not know what that looked like as a career. I created art during that time which focused on the universality of human experiences, the pain of grief and loneliness, and existential questions.

Some years later, I was presented with an article about a woman who made pottery to help herself therapeutically. I read about how she maximized the problem-solving functions of her brain in a healing fashion. How the left hemisphere in our brain is responsible for language and the right controls creativity. I realized that’s what I had been doing with my camera for years finding a way to process when I couldn’t talk about things. I further realized that people who struggled to talk about difficulties could use creative arts therapy to explore that which could not be formed into words. I had my direction.