02/12/2024
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As part of my personal and professional developmentent, I have been taking courses at Northwest Creative & Expressive Arts Institute to work towards a certificate in Expressive Art Therapy. Here is some response artwork and a reflection I wrote after an all-day poetry workshop:
“I greatly enjoyed the Poetry module yesterday with Bobbi and Cleo. After so much amazing cocreation and collaboration through communal poetry writing and meaning making, I wanted to sum up my day with a piece of art that is at once created by me, but also utilizes and repurposes the work of others. Collage letters gathered from various reading materials, rearranged into new words with personal meaning. Confetti rain that I hand cut from a friend’s holiday card. Green paint gifted by a neighbor. Paper straws snipped and transformed into tiny blossoms. The person in the cloud I reached for and cut out while in conversation with a dear friend on the telephone. This painting was made by me alone in an office, yet together with my friends, neighbors, peers, colleagues, printers and writers and factory workers around the globe. Each of these materials passed through many hands to reach me, then they passed through my hands to construct their own collaborative meaning through synthesis of their disparate parts. Just like how each person passes through different hands holding and guiding them, pointing them in the right direction, but sometimes also pointing them in the wrong direction. We are all made up of disparate parts, cobbled together to construct the people we are now. And as surely as the sun will rise and set every day, we also shed certain parts and gather certain parts daily to tinker with this gorgeous and messy masterpiece know as the Self, an ever-changing and ever-evolving masterpiece that continues to live on through memories and lessons long after our physical forms have transitioned on. Thank you all for meeting me, sharing with me, and generously imparting wisdom and ideas and care and love that I use to construct who I am from moment to moment. I hope I can provide the same to you.
