Holding Space

The creative process is inherently expressive. Everything from the choice of what color you use to the way that you infuse emotion into a song gives so much insight into the unconscious. When I was a medical student and saw how art therapists were able to tap into trauma, grief and emotion that had been hard for patients to talk about, I was amazed at how powerful art could be in the clinical setting.

Clinicians often think about a holding space to support very difficult things within a therapeutic framework. One big theme in my own art is the idea of the container, including ritual bowls and meditation or singing bowls. These bowls are attuned to a specific pitch, and because they’re designed around one frequency, they can resonate. The sound can grow in power because of the structured container around it — you can really hear it, whereas you may not have been able to otherwise. When we create intentional spaces around things that are hard to talk about, the container allows those important parts of our unconscious to emanate and for us to understand them better.