A Journey Back to Earth through Belonging to ART

This project is an opportunity to weave various learnings, wonderings, and experiences together toward offering something greater than the sum of its parts. It is a process of integration as I follow the thread of that which pulls at my hearts strings and work to distill the essence of what it beats for: namely, a longing to mend a broken bond with the earth and cultivate a greater sense of belonging in the world. Collectively, this ache lives in many of us. In sharing my creative process alongside musings and theory from art therapists, KATI instructors, indigenous elders, and philosophers I am dissolving my story into a larger story of being alive in this particular time and place. Through this, I am belonging myself to a generation of human beings who have lost their way and want nothing more than to be reabsorbed back into Nature.

This capstone project has three main sections. In part one, I offer an account of phenomenology, weaving in learnings from my philosophy degree and art therapy training. I explore the ways in which phenomenology invites us to turn toward our lived experience of being in the world where earth, body, and art reside. Through this I share my developing approach as an emerging phenomenological art therapist. I am coming to know that my integration as a human and artist is inseparable from my development as an art therapist.

In part two, I offer that the ‘story of separation’ (Eisenstein, 2013), is at the core of western culture’s deepest wound, and thereby my own. In this chapter, I explore the way language shapes, reflects, and perpetuates our stories, followed with the role art, art therapy, and metaphor can play in the creation of new ones. Drawing on Francis Weller and Johanna Macy’s work, I explore the way grief and love support us in moving through the story of separation and back into one of belonging. Finally, in part three I turn toward my creative process of working with natural materials to explore some of the people, practices, and places I yearn to belong to. This section tells a story of a journey back to earth through belonging to ART: Ancestry, Reciprocity and Time.