AimsTo understand how counsellors' personal creativity informs their professional work with clients.MethodGrounded theory methodology was employed alongside arts‐based research methods. Ten experienced counsellors, active in some form of expressive arts, participated in semi‐structured interviews prior to and following an experiential creative task that involved representing what creativity meant to them, and kept a reflective log throughout the process.FindingsCreativity was viewed by the participants as an important, potentially transformational aspect of their therapeutic work. Creativity was experienced as a relational process that contributed to moment‐by‐moment responsiveness and as a means of establishing meaning and coherence through integrating different forms of experience. The personal creativity of participants was understood as a contribution to their professional creativity in the role of therapist.ConclusionThe study highlights the value of enhancing counsellor and psychotherapist understanding and confidence in respect of ways in which personal creativity can be combined with counselling theory and experience. Limitations of the research are also considered.
In the relative comfort of my UK living room, a passive spectator of TV news, I watch fleeting images of appalling suffering and devastation emanating from the war in Syria. The coverage of the bombing of Aleppo (2015) is heart-rending. I turn to art in response, to slow the disappearance of visual images and to counter my sense of remove. This begins as self-activism, drawing/painting-as-inquiry, in combination with journal writing. As the work progresses, portraits burst out of the sketchbook and claim space to speak for themselves, demanding a place in the wider world, their own artivism. What they communicate to each viewer will vary—a commentary on war, on a country’s response to migration, or a call to action for what might be different? The inquiry moves through personal and cultural layers of a creative process to question what art does, and what it fails to do, in the context of this project and activism. Art’s potential, through the acts of looking and making, to affect is central to the sequence of encounters (connections and disconnections), which are examined here.
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