Participatory Art Installation:

The place of, and spaces for, art therapy are radically shifting and changing beyond the clinic and therapy room. Whole populations are moving in search of refuge and hope. How do we as art therapists respond to the ethical call of difference, transience and displacement? A quartet of artists from opposite sides of the globe have come together to respond to these concerns.
Morris and Westwood are offering a series of three art-based sessions where participants respond to these themes through constructing a site-specific art installation - an encampment of embellished tent structures on the college field. Participants can use already assembled structures or are invited to bring/post ahead their unwanted or broken tents. The aim is to rethink our relationships to the spaces in which we work, and to reveal and reflect on the cultural significance of art, space, and art therapy practice. Bachelard (1994) explores the intimate spaces of the house that constitute a body of images giving the illusion of stability - a stability questioned, here, by the impermanence and mobility of the ‘tent city’. This allows glimpses of a coexisting visual order that intersects with ours (Berger, 2001).
Lever and Linnell work into this disconcerting yet compelling ‘in-between’ in two ways: through a linked conference paper, and by tracing ‘material’ routes through the negative spaces between the tents with builder’s string line and plumb. These geometries will striate physical, emotional and intellectual spaces, bringing marginalised possibilities to attention. Visitors approaching from multiple entry points will be invited to follow the contours of the outside in order to find what is folded inside (Deleuze, 1988). In ‘intra-action’ (Barad, 2007) with each other, our ‘selves’, the site, the materials and some provocative philosophies, a ‘third space’ (Bhabha, 2004) of art therapy begins to emerge.

Conductors
Anita Lever
Anita offers individual and group art therapy within mental health (mood disorders and eating disorders) programs, and devises ‘Cross Pollination’ art installation projects with hospital patients and staff. Her own experimental, mixed media work is occasionally exhibited around Sydney. Anita has developed ‘Material Matters’, a methodology which she has practised in participatory art installations with Anna Moraova and adapted for arts-based research workshops.
Sheridan Linnell
Sheridan is Senior Lecturer in The Master of Art Therapy at WSU, where she has a teaching, coordination and research role. She is currently engaged in research partnerships exploring arts-based mental health recovery with a group of artists with lived experience of mental health issues, and conducting an arts based, narrative enquiry (with Lever) into how difference and diversity shapes arts therapies in the Asia Pacific region. Sheridan is passionate about socially just art therapy for a postcolonial, diverse world.
Lesley Morris
Lesley is a Lecturer on the MA Art Psychotherapy, and HCPC registered Art Psychotherapist with a primary interest in Parent-infant, Child and Adolescent Mental Health. Lesley is a practicing artist who exhibits as part of ‘the unconscious group’ of artists and educators on the staff team of the MA Art
Psychotherapy at Goldsmiths. Her research interests include the Art Therapy Large Group, and art based research into the unconscious.
Jill Westwood
Jill is Programme Convenor of the MA Art Psychotherapy, a HCPC registered Art Psychotherapist and Artist. From a background in art she has worked predominately in art therapy education including a period in Australia 1995-2008. Her research interests encompass the transformative potential of art and art based approaches.

https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/18703