THERAPY + CREATIVE PROCESS

“Artists often begin something without knowing how it will turn out. In practice, this translates as thinking through doing”

On Not Knowing: How Artists Think // Elizabeth Fisher + Rebecca Fortnum

Integrative therapy with a focus on creative process

conversation / association / diagramming / writing / making / body-focused approaches / incorparating objects* into therapy and exploring what they evoke, reveal, or connect to for you

[*any object - e.g. film, poetry, recipes, clothing, photographs, found objects, images, music, video, food etc]

For anyone interested in drawing on their own creative work, or their responses to other people’s, as a starting point for conversation and exploration in their therapy

For writers, cooks, researchers, gardeners, artists, students, musicians, performers, or anyone with any kind of creative practice

For anyone interested in using therapy to work with experiences of stuckness, obstacles, disconnection or transition around their creativity

You do not need to make a living / make money from your practice or be connected to an institution to do this therapy

  • No - I am not trained as an art psychotherapist. I offer integrative therapy, with a particular focus on your relationship to creative process

  • Although you can share your own work in sessions if you wish to, there is no requirement to do so

  • Either - all information regarding sessions is detailed on the main therapy page

why this

I am interested in creativity and unconscious processes, the ties between our internal world and the evocative objects we encounter or make, and the catalytic process of creating framed gaps - or containers - in therapy, making, and ritual. This approach to therapy foregrounds the relationship between these processes

I left art school somewhere between the 3rd and 4th year. Then came many years of false starts, beginning and abandoning work, ambivalence. Later, therapy disrupted notions of bounded and discrete phases, delineation, beginnings and endings. It helped me find my way back to a practice that made sense to me, by mirroring a process I mistakenly thought I had lost

lying fallow…trying out…waiting…trying again…gestation…sudden leaps forward…repetition…destruction…a refrain reappearing in different guises year after year…interstices…ritual…im/mobilising forces of desire, frustration, envy, lack, anxiety, love

“Making is a thinking in its own right”

Against Method // Erin Manning