A PERSONAL VIEW

The Art of Being

The effect in sickness of beautiful objects,…especially brilliancy of colour is hardly at all appreciated… People say the effect is only on the mind. It is no such thing, the effect is on the body too…Variety of form and brilliancy of colour in the objects presented to patients is an actual means of recovery.

These are words from Florence Nightingale’s Notes on Nursing written about 1860 and people are often surprised when I quote them when tracing the history of art therapy in Britain. I use them because I want to draw attention to connection between art and healing, art and the art of science. When I say this is how I earn a living I am often met with quizzical looks although it also has to be said, with interest and curiosity.

So how did I arrive here? For as long as I can remember I have been exploring the world around me in a visual way, at a very early age secreting my scribblings away for later retrieval rather like a squirrel hiding food in times of plenty for later need. Playing at the bottom of the garden in a world of soil, stones and old car tyres, my parents mercifully giving up all hope of a neatly tended garden and giving my brother and I a rich and plentiful playground. As I grew a piece of garden was allocated especially for me and my relationship with the Anima Mundi, the world’s soul flourished. A realisation too that this was a world of responsibilities, if this piece of garden was especially mine then I had some responsibility for it.

At school my drawings brought me praise from my peers, how good that felt and the better that feeling the more I drew and painted. I loved other things too literature and geography, another expression of my love of the Anima Mundi. After circumventing the wishes of well meaning teachers I found myself at art school in the 1960s, that glorious and sometimes very painful time of youthful existential angst. For those of us fortunate enough to experience it, a time of education for education’s sake, knowing there was work a plenty for us at the end of it we could wander at will through a maze of thoughts and ideas. Idling through the great philosophers, wallowing in Nietzsche as if Ass’s milk.

Leading me to realise that we live in a landscape of relationships, not least by our move to being ‘space’ travellers, we ‘surf the Internet’ we travel a galaxy of encounters through e-mail, we tap out our communications via our fingertips or entrust our voices to the dulling force of telecommunications. Our feet are redundant, we are ‘space acrobats’, and Marshall McLuhan’s ‘global village’, such an amazing idea in my student days is, indeed a reality. This is a macroscopic view; there is another view of course.

Close to my house runs a small burn, a quietly shimmering stream that can, in an instant be transformed into a thundering and threatening deluge when swollen by torrential rain. An irresistible metaphor for the emotional life of each one of us, we can rarely predict when the familiar and manageable will be transformed into the unknown and irrational. The source of a river is as mysterious as birth itself and its route to the sea as unique as life’s journey to mortal death. The river’s course shaping and being shaped by the landscape through which it flows as it resists or moulds to the matter that it meets. Like a river we are shaped by the complexity of our environment but that shape can be transformed by the quicksand of our own emotions or of those around us. One moment we can be negotiating the ‘stepping stones’ with ease and then sometimes, almost without warning we can no longer stand and are terrified by the depth and power of the water.

My work as a therapist working through the medium of art involves a particular kind of relationship, the word therapy deriving from the Greek for servant. So really I see myself as being servant of a process, supporting a client through their own particular deluge, a process of making sense of the non-sense or sometimes simply becoming able to accept it in such a way that it is no longer such a barrier to living a life they want. In the therapeutic space I aim to offer a place of quiet and security where private and unspoken inner earth can be walked upon perhaps for the first time.

Margaret Temple