Narratives of Art Practice and Mental Wellbeing

Reparation and connection

Olivia Sagan

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415821124
• eBook ISBN: 9781136740152
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Mental Health in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

Narratives of Art Practice and Mental Wellbeing draws on extensive research carried out with mental health service users who are also practicing artists. Using narrative data gained through hours of reflective conversation, it explores not whether art can contribute to positive wellbeing and improved mental health - as this is now established ground - but rather how art works, and the role art making can play in people's lives as they encounter crises, relapse, recovery or 'beyonding'.

The book maps the delicate ways in which finding a means to tell our story sometimes is the creative project we seek, and offers a reminder of how intrinsically linked our life trajectories are with creative opportunities. It describes the wide range of artistic activity occurring in health and community settings and the meanings of these practices to people with histories of mental turbulence. Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, the book explore the stories and various forms of visual arts practices spoken of, and considers the art making processes, the creative moments and the objects which in some cases have changed people's lives.

The seven chapters of the book offer a blend of personal testimony, theory, debate, critique and celebration, and examine key topics of deliberation within the fields of art therapy, arts in health, community arts practice, participatory arts, and widening participation within arts education. It will be valuable reading for researchers, students, artists and practitioners in these fields.

1 Chris, Kandinsky and the autobiography of the question

A brief introduction

Chris comes into the small white room. The security guard accompanying him catches my eye, gives me a short nod and leaves us. Chris makes the briefest of eye contact, and then carefully sets down a rolled-up poster. I quietly ask after him as I unpack his paints and lay out a few basic tools including a plastic cup of water. Chris is, as ever, very quiet, gentle and slow in his responses. An ethereal looking man of about 25, he gives the impression of being younger – and of having left, or leaving, or never having quite arrived.

He unrolls his poster: Kandinsky’s Squares with Concentric Circles. I unroll the watercolour copy that he has been working on with me, for weeks. He sets to work, eagerly, hungrily; mixing colours, looking quickly from poster to copy to paints. Now and then he shoots me a look, and I see his eyes are bright, animated; there is colour to his face, and his features are held in concentration, an expression of intensity yet relaxation, of arrival. He feels more in the room now.

I don’t know how the painting is working on him, in him – either the original or the copy, or the process of bringing the two into some imagined alignment. But for a short session, week after week, something important is happening for Chris. And for me too.

With this encounter some years ago in a high security psychiatric ward, I began my wondering at the frisson of art meeting the troubled mind and its sadnesses. Not long afterwards I began the research path that led to the narratives in this book. And as any presentation of the stories of others should start with who the listener is, allow me in this introductory chapter a brief autobiographical note.

Such an autobiographic note is perhaps overdue. In researching this book I was often taken aback by the generosity and openness of people who shared their stories while often knowing so little about me. But one day, after speaking briefly with a man who had decided not to consent to an interview, I realized that his understandable assumptions about me were born of my approach to this research. This has been to foreground others as much as possible, and keep the reflexive, autobiographic side of this endeavour to myself – appearing, no doubt, aloof at times, and less generous with my story than people were with theirs. There were conflicting positionings in this research, each of which had its own forcefield that attracted and repelled the other at different moments. One position issued from my work as researcher in which a certain amount of self-disclosure is acceptable – even desirable depending on your approach; while another came from my work as counsellor, where it is rarely helpful or acceptable in the clinical relationship for the counsellor story, in whatever distilled form, to be shared. So I offer here, in this introductory space to the chapters that follow, some background to the autobiography of the question which lay behind the interviews in this book – what is the experience of art practice in the lives of people with histories of mental ill health.

My fascination for voice, narrative and creative ways of building a life story is rooted in my own family history, in watching people close to me struggle for, and with, words. Early on in my life it became clear to me that stories both soothed trouble and caused trouble – and yet they always battled to be told, a telling whose contested nature I describe in Chapter 4 of this book. This early home-front history would steer me at first, precariously, into the visual arts (Sagan, 2007a) and arts applications, where I became aware maybe for the first time of two persisting fundamentals. One, that class and its bestowed privilege and haphazardly allocated lack not only regulates one’s access to mainstream culture but dominates it; and two, in the collateral damage of the British class system there are stifled lives yet incredible, ignited stories. These stories, of how individuals get caught up, pulled along and sometimes pulled under by poverty, illness and distress, talked to me not only of the rough tides of these lives, but of the ingenious ways that people found to navigate them.

Later, once I began teaching in community learning organizations, with their draughty, one-bar-electric-fire, mugs-of-tea settings, I was struck again by the stories of resourcefulness and resilience, particularly amongst learners for whom the very business of learning was fraught, and the enterprise of daily life no less so. My years as a teacher of adult learners were also busy with opportunities for me to observe the impact of learning and art making in the lives of institutionalized mental health patients, some of whom, like Chris, I grew to know over a sustained period of time. My vignette at the beginning of this chapter is from notes I made while teaching in a high security psychiatric hospital – a rare experience rich in moments of wonder, confusion and dismay.

In working daily with this array of learners, the mentally ill, the refugee, the homeless, the battered and the isolated, I was struck by how, in the words of Nobel Prize winner Rabindranth Tagore (2002), ‘Thought feeds itself with its own words and grows’. I watched and listened as learning, in these relatively safe spaces, seemed to embellish people’s stories with more subtle words, a deeper access to their personal biographies and sometimes a greater range of choices about who they could become. In both art and pedagogy, I began feeling my way along the contours of the tricky and delicate interface of learning, creativity and mental illness (Sagan, 2012), and so began a fascination for the numerous struggles I saw people grapple with, and the often complex strategies they developed in order to live better lives.

On later becoming a counsellor, the story listener par excellence, in hindsight an almost inevitable move, the intrigue continued, now for the way in which stories in the therapeutic setting, no less an educational space, appeared to frame, limit or even release people. I eventually began to ‘do research’ – what the wonderful anthropologist and novelist Zora Neale Hurston (1891–1960) called ‘formalized curiosity’. First this formalized curiosity led me to look at the written words of those with histories of mental illness, then to looking at their art work, and to what their stories told me about their encounter with each. A short time later my father, who for decades had suffered a shifting and perplexing mental illness, died (Sagan, 2013), but not before showing me again what I had found repeatedly in my research – that the story we construct and the life that we remember demand expression. This story is re-made and its telling rendered even more mysterious by age, and, in my father’s case, by Alzheimer’s. Observing my father’s final struggle with the disease, in a life full of literal war, personal battles, attacks both real and imagined followed by their copious and necessary defences, I was to be reminded once again how fragile yet durable and always extraordinary the human mind is. Theory, whichever – take your pick – by which to understand it, can only barely scratch the surface.

The fascination for this listening to stories of lives has never left me. It returns to me now as I listen to the interviews for this book again. And in working with the transcripts or listening to the pauses and chuckles and sobs and silences – brought into play once more is a long-term and ambivalent relationship with stories. This ambivalence warns me that stories are fickle – the speaker and the seduced listener are performing an intricate inter-subjective dance which is co-constructed within the bounds of this particular moment and relationship; and yes, stories are slippery – the very words we speak are full of the voices of others and the multifarious tricks of memory and connection. In Riessman’s words, ‘The “truths” of narrative accounts lie not in their faithful representation of a past world, but in the shifting connections they forge between past, present, and future’ (2002: 705). In Chapters 4, 5 and 6, I try to trace these connections between a story’s past, present and future, and look at the role of art, in helping make, identify and question such connections. So this book is born of my fascination; for story, for art making, for health – and the curious ways in which these are interlinked.

In every story there is a nugget that emerges as the teller weaves her story of past, present and future. A nugget not of ‘truth’ or of the essential being of the teller, but a nugget of sense, for want of a better word, a resonant something that leads us to think otherwise about the story, about the experience, about the teller, and, if we use our antennae, about the listener. That nugget can be taken and worked with, as I have tried to do across this research. Magpie-like, I have descended on these stories and tried to get hold of how art works for people when pretty much all else fails. And that’s what this book offers. Organized nuggets. Organized through the filter of me and turned over in my hands while shining a soft light on each one, a light of theories and observations which have been shown, for me, to light a way to some better excavation.

So who are you, reading this book? Such organized nuggets may interest you if, like me, like so many of the people in this book, you have questions about the relationship between what we think, how we feel and what we do. These questions are the bedrock of both psychology and philosophy, but I offer rather less elevated, working examples of this relationship, drawn from the experiences of the people with whom I spoke. You may be an artist yourself. You may be at an early stage of wondering about the relationship between who you are and the work you produce – in which case the book will offer an introduction to a rich literature connecting the unconscious, with its strata of memory, fears, joys and yearning, to our creative outputs. You may be a student in the area of mental health, planning to become a counsellor perhaps, or a community health professional. You may have already come across the use of First Person Narratives through the work, for example, of Gail Hornstein in the US. It has impressed you, perhaps, as a means by which to understand better and more respectfully the people with whom you may already be working; people for whom mental illness and its DSM 5 diagnoses are stuck like limpets across their case notes, whilst they simultaneously live lives which are complex, often difficult, and sometimes ingeniously creative.

Or you may yourself be just such a person. Tired, perhaps, of the sedimented, medical version of who you are. Troubled by that version, one that prescribes what your ‘condition’ and therapeutic regime are and what they limit you to. Perhaps you are busy with managing your own life strategies and have an inkling that making art helps forge another version of yourself – by chiselling a life story through alternative means of working with your past and its cicatrices, your breakthroughs and your beyond. To you then, a special welcome is extended. For after years of listening to the stories of mental health service users; survivors; the mentally ill; the mad; however you have positioned yourselves before me and my recording device, I do know that your stories about your experiences don’t ‘just’ tell us about you – they tell us about us; the ‘sane’ – and our frightfully sane society.

You may have opened this book because its title pinged onto one of your devices and you are one of a growing number of artists who, for your own multifaceted reasons, are working in an ‘Arts in Health’ context, and have long been asking some of the questions alighted on in this book. Questions such as those in Chapter 3, perhaps, about where and how your art practice and its applications touch or have touched the lives of people with mental health difficulties. In that case Chapter 3 may be of special interest to you, where people describe their artful encounters and transitions as they moved in work and identity from, in some instances, easel in a psychiatric ward to one-person exhibitions in the world outside the psychiatric cloister.

Perhaps you are a psychologist or researcher working in the expanding field of narrative psychology – exploring the mysteries and few certainties regarding the interplay between who we are, how we become so, how we tell that story and what impact on our wellbeing that telling and disclosure has. A study whose interplay was the stuff of Freud’s cases as he scrutinized the stories of people in distress and what their unguarded and free-associative words might reveal about the genesis of that distress and its particular ways of telling itself. Psychology, in getting over its long-standing anxiety about both qualitative research and the legacy of narrative being traced back to psychoanalytic interest in the spoken word, is readier now, to include narrative into its disciplinary fold, and steadier too, its relationship with stories of mental illness and how they inform psychological knowledge.

You may, finally, be researching the impact of arts on the lives of people outside the mainstream; the impact of arts participation and the means by which people access arts activity. You could well be part of a growing body of people who, aware of the mounting evidence of a correlative or even causative link between art and wellbeing, are wishing to explore what people say about this link and in some way evaluate the impact of art in their lives. Or maybe you are none of these readers. Perhaps you have picked this book up on a bench in a train station in line with one of those serendipitous laws that dictate that we come across the books we need to. Maybe before the train arrives you will be inspired by the narratives in this book to ask the questions: am I living my life as creatively, as congruently, as I can? How do I choose to tell my story?

You may be all or some of the above, depending on the day, your role and your hat. Indeed, in my talking to people about arts activity and mental health, I often tripped up on their roles, my assumptions and the play of disciplinary languages in whose cross-purpose interactions misunderstandings sometimes run rampant. People who were community artists mentioned a history of depression, of breakdown, or, in a throwaway line, the fact that they ‘started painting after their first suicide attempt’. Their ‘research’ was their art and their illness; their ‘practice’ both their art and their mental health work in the community. People I engaged with in their role as project workers, busily organising budgets and venues, turned out to be service users or part-time lecturers in Fine Art. People I thought were art students turned out to be – as well as art students – residents of therapeutic communities and community activists … and people who I thought were mental health service users were … service users, but also, it turned out, sometimes managed high-profile arts projects, or had done research into schizophrenia and symbolism; ran successful companies, painted gorgeous landscapes, wrote, ran marathons, climbed mountains. You get the picture – and it is a picture familiar to anyone who has stepped into mental health settings for any short period of time. It is also not new to anyone who has stepped into life for any short period of time, as the first thing to be learned is that people are, and are not, what we think they are; they, we, are always so much more.

So how can this book be read? Well, it can be dipped in to, glanced at, picked up and put down, or read cover to cover. As I tell my students, however, the latter should only be attempted with any non-fiction book for very good reasons known only to the reader. You may, in either case, want to pause to enjoy the images, question them, wonder at them. I suspect the best way to read the book is by first looking at parts that resonate with your own area of experience or interest. You will find that chapters vary in how many references are included and how much theory they contain. Some chapters, for example Chapter 2, where I give a historical foothold in the area of research into mental illness and creativity, are reference-heavy; others, where I include theory I have found useful in trying to understand some of the mental processes involved in making art and how these aid wellbeing, for example Chapters 5 and 6, are more theory-heavy. In both cases I hope that the references and theory I have chosen to include point the reader usefully in a solid direction for further investigation – rather than serve to cloud and deter from the experiences of people, and the questions such experiences raise. There is a wealth of material now in the area of art and mental health, and I hope you, the reader, will be inspired to explore it further if you have not already begun to do so.

This formalized curiosity

My research background roots its ethical stance and approach in the feminist research paradigm that spoke loudly of collaboration; of participation, and of ‘giving voice’. Of course, the road is muddied and bloodied now – collaboration and participation are questioned with more acuity today in terms of power and critiqued more finely in terms of access and asymmetry – areas of unrest of which I offer more detail in Chapter 3. Collaboration is now increasingly online, with virtual relationships usurping those in the flesh, and international, global forums are possible in a way that only small local groupings were possible in the past. It is potentially just as easy for someone in the UK to collaborate with a peer in Arcadia, Arizona as one in Litherland, Liverpool. In terms of voice, the internet and its now myriad social networking opportunities is potentially better at ‘giving’ this than researchers, and voice itself is more heavily contested, as is the ‘truth’ of the words which we speak – a point to which I return in Chapter 4. In tandem is the challenge of working with the ‘self’ in what Bauman (2000) referred to as ‘liquid modernity’, wherein we are all more changeable and open to multiple (re-)creations than ever before. A change of autobiography is as simple as a change of avatar. In these Facebooked days, with the multiple potentialities for reconfigurations and perhaps multiple errors of memory and history, we are just as likely to be worried about the right to be forgotten as we are the right to be heard. Many of these challenges prompt us to hold in mind that we are in a research era where questions about how ‘new’ knowledge is formulated, disseminated, used and by whom – are more pressing than ever.

The tense, messy, unpredictable and shifting character of the research in which many qualitative researchers are involved tells us something straight off the bat about investigations into human experience. This message – that human experience is itself tense, messy, unpredictable and shifting – is one which quantitative research does not address, cleansed as it is of such human features and focused as it is on other questions and ways of measuring their answers. Qualitative research, at its best, takes as its very material the ‘unclear’. The ‘surplus’ that is so irksome to positivistic research and the very notion of the ‘outlier’ – become the very core of our endeavour. In choosing not only to not omit the unclear and the outlier, but instead to work with them, we endeavour to avoid the pitfall described by German theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg who suggested that when research omits all that is unclear, we are left with ‘completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies’ (Heisenberg, 1971: 213).

Mike White (2005) amongst others argues that testimony from people is increasingly regarded as a valid form of ‘evidence’ despite the continued clarion call to positivistic means by which to count, measure and offer statistically significant proofs of X. Such a turn in the face of the still dominant trend, gradual...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Foreword by Lynn Froggett
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Chris, Kandinsky and the autobiography of the question: a brief introduction
• 2 Mental illness and creativity: links, myths and arty facts
• 3 Transitions: participation and collaboration
• 4 Lost for words, found by image
• 5 Art making, unmaking and repair
• 6 Mirrors and connection
• 7 Afterword: a singular fascination
• References
• Index