This week, the LivingRoom’s big blue bus stopped by Durham College to help give students a chance to create art while also meeting new people.
Students could also take part in Art in the Pit where they could paint or draw on their own or with friends. They could also participate in someone else’s art, such as adding a positive note on a ‘leaf’.
Amelia Polster is a 21-year-old student in the Fine Arts Program at Durham College and, to her, art is “everything.”
“I know that is such a generic answer but if I didn’t have it, my life would be so dull. I find it in everything and use it to cope with some of like the hardest situations in my life, as well as enjoy the greatest parts of my life,” she says.
Art Therapist and Art Psychotherapist (Qualifying) Rachel Daley explains why art can be important for everyone.
“It’s the actual physicality of the art making, and that can be therapeutic within itself,” she says.
Daley says there are two types of art therapy: directive or non- directive. In one, she guides the person on what to draw or do, and with the other the client is encouraged to gravitate to the art tools that interests them.
“As long as you’re also touching on verbal skills, or the actual problem the person is dealing with, that can actually be as insight provoking as the imagery,” she says.
Daley says art therapy can be helpful for many things, including trauma, mental health, behavioural and relationship issues.
“It can be something that really is a tactile presentation of what’s going on inside, so the art maker and client can see from a distance what’s going on,” she says.
Daley says there is a part of our brain, the decision-making part, that is tied to linguistics, cognitions, and thinking patterns.
“The other part of our brain, which is the reptilian part, it is the oldest part,” she says. “That part of our brain is where the deepest experiences, traumas, feelings are held.”
Daley says art therapy can reach that part of your brain, it can help recall memory, and blocked emotion.
“The art-making process much like dreaming, and much just like a feeling you get in your body when you think of something coming up that’s stressful,” she says, “the art making process is a really fluid way to get insight into that.”
Daley encourages everyone to partake in art, no matter their age, because it is the creation of something that feels positive and productive.
Polster agrees and says art is “like magic almost.”
“It makes me feel alive, and it makes me feel worth, I don’t know it makes me feel on top of the world,” she says.