Why Community Art Practice?

Why I’m Passionate About Facilitating Community Art

         Today, August 19, 2017, I swam in the pool at the gym! I have been trying to remember the co-ordination of my limbs for moving through the water reasonably smoothly for years! Today August 19, 2017, my body somehow RECONNECTED the full length of my legs to the activity of kicking! Ahhh yes! This is what it is like to experience the felt sense of smooth, long propulsion through the water with my whole body!  Joyful surprise of whole body functioning filled me. This somehow newly found, remembered ability, meaning I CAN, is mine again!

         On February 14, 1999, I was in a horse riding accident. On that day, I experienced the crushing and twisting of my torso and spine from my tail bone to my skull, a redistributing of abdominal organs, and the destruction of neurological pathways from my brain to my body especially my limbs. I also sustained a brain injury that left me without many years of memory, unable to manage emotional flooding, with altered visual capacity, a thick muddy experiencing of a felt sense of life, and a newly expanded pain scale unlike anything I had ever known. I felt like a shattered glass window barely held together by its frame, in a posture of intense vulnerability and excruciating self-protection. Sheer determination to experience as little loss of connection with my husband, children, extended family and profession as possible somehow propelled me through my day-to-day life for a few years.

         After the accident, I could no longer integrate information or function through left brain pathways in clear fashion. Intellectual and embodied intelligence remained locked in me, in chaos and unable to be refined, reshaped, accessed or developed through regular thought processes. For a highly functioning woman, this was an extremely painful part of my experience.

         Three months after the accident, I graduated from Lesley University with an MA in Clinical Mental Health, with specializations in Holistic Practice and Expressive Arts Therapy. The specialization in Expressive Arts Therapy became such a place of grace in my work with others and my own life. As my body was literally being reconstructed by physical therapists, massage therapists and chiropractors, my soul, my heart and my brain were being re-imagined into functioning through personal and community art making. Expressive Arts therapy as low skill, high sensitivity embodied work emerging through the senses, was a healing process which met me right where I was, in my own place of being remade, and even newly made through imaginative play. My laughter was restored along with neural pathways, the ability to breathe more fully, and newfound abilities for sharing life with others that were Oh So Much Bigger, Fuller and Freer!

         A turning point in my Expressive Arts Journey came in the fall of 2001/2002 I believe (I am still a bit memory impaired). I attended a series of EXA workshops with Shaun McNiff.  The shards of myself were reheated in the alchemical process of embodied art making and repetition in this peer group setting as Shaun guided us through.  Together we engaged sensory based, intuitive, multi-modal, embodied work that was held by following the emergent, engaging repetition, trusting the process, and experiencing the vulnerability of seeing and being seen.  I was aware too that our process seemed held by something larger than myself and larger than the group. I sensed a warmth, comfort and safety that truly comes in the presence of love. The courage came to live into healing moments of soul-filled singing and moving which re-enlivened my sense of being originally formed as living artistry in my mother’s womb. The group with Shaun as facilitator created together a container safe enough for delving deep and excavating hidden beauty within ourselves.

Beholding, bringing forth, and sharing Beauty has been the way of my mother’s family and Maltese Italian heritage for generations. As my training and self healing continued, body memories awoke in me of old habits of engaging visual art, dance, movement and music as practices of resiliency and hope in my youth and young adult years. The muse, the spirit of Creator/Creating was once again alive in my psyche and soul.  I could sense myself once again as an integrated self in the making, always seeking Beauty amongst us.

         In 2005 I returned to Graduate school seeking an MDiv.  Sensory based artistry re-made in me flourished as I facilitated Collaborative Community Art in Worship in the Seminary. A multi-ethinic, multi-lingual, gender inclusive, multi-national, intergenerational group of students came together with the hope of creating artfully engaging worship experiences for the entire seminary community. Together we explored themes of liturgical life through a frame I developed for Collaborative Community Art Making. We stepped into liminal space, a time out of time where social constructs of who we were defined to be were left aside. We engaged various modalities of visual art making, sounding, dance and movement to explore themes, ideas and imaginings. Weavings extended upward in two-story tall Chapel windows, stories formed telling us what mattered, movement and dance brought forth the sense of Spirit, and sacred presence and performance led to ways for the entire worship community to be gathered into artful expressions of love. Collaborative Community Art making became the opportunity to form a community full of dignity in diversity in a Seminary setting.  It was also a very difficult space as diverse people were invited to share this exploration in an atmosphere of mores and folkways profoundly shaped in colonialist, patriarchal, white western male dominance.  Through Collaborative Community Arts based Worship, Hope grew in me that the divides of oppression could be transformed. I also came to understand that I would need to go beyond the seminary to engage the human community more fully.

         On Friday August 11, 2011 (I looked it up) Shaun McNiff and Paolo Knill co-facilitated a one-day conference, “Liberating Creativity: Courage to Lead.” From Alaska to Boston I did go! Such sacred space it was indeed. I was introduced to Paolo’s way of expanding the range of play, and the possibilities for engaging the art emerging among people gathered. We created a parade! As my group worked to become an offering to be witnessed by the street crowd, the synergy of us made space for a new experience we could have never have created alone. We were different from each other in so many ways and similar in our potential for participating in the incredible craft of bringing forth an emerging art piece. Paolo led us through our senses, rather than words, and through embodied presencing rather than habituated thoughts, to be present with each other. Paolo fostered our willingness to be enticed, interested in the process and surprised by what would come, and we were! We found a way to live into the humility and generosity of making space not only for each other, but for “the third,” the art as its own entity developing with us.  For a little while, I was flying as a Hawk, sounding the call of fully experiencing and Joyously belonging in the parade of musical, dancing, finger-snapping float form of my group.  That day, I learned to trust the Community Art Practice process as pathway for bringing diverse people into shared space of dignity as human community. This was joyous to me!

        

         Since this workshop in 2011, I have gone on to receive a Certificate of Advanced Graduate Studies in Expressive Arts Therapies and Community Art and am currently working on my dissertation in Community Art Practice as pathway for peace-building. I have facilitated Community Art Practice in the form of low skill, high sensitivity work in five countries, and taught in three. I have facilitated Community Art in groups as small as 6 and as large as 260. Facilitations have sometimes focused on theme-close work such as exploring gender oppression, cultural humility, bridging socially constructed divides of race, class, gender identity, and the anguish of collective trauma and transitory existence. Other Community Art facilitations were about holding space for friendships to grow, laughter, vulnerability and trust to become normalized, imagination and hope to flourish and community joy to expand exponentially. In all these circumstances, I have experienced the power of Community Art as an opportunity for imagining wholeness and bringing forth a foretaste of what we can live into in community wholeness embraced by beauty. 

         What began as a very personal journey of rediscovery and newly imagining my own life has emerged into a lifelong exploration of imagining human community in dignity and diversity. In Community Art Practice, we joyfully engage in forming emerging works of art with others in a process that is open wide to the collective imagination and Beauty inherent in both the process of being together and experiencing the art that comes! It is an artful practice of forming dignity in diversity for the sake of bringing forth the beloved beautiful human community. 

In Community Art Practice we together become, Living Artistry.