The process of ‘understanding through making’ offers a powerful catalyst to elicit personal and interpersonal connection through creative practice, pausing, collecting and collating. Utilise this practice as a way of engaging new clients, or colleagues, welcoming creative ideas (yours and others’), visualising priorities and facilitating interaction through creative potential (that hidden source, we all have).
The 2-hour session is designed to offer a joyful, practical and soul-nourishing space to welcome the power and potential of creative exercises. Facilitated by art practitioner, community artist and scholar Dr Francesca Bernardi (CATA, FRSA). Making together and responding to materials in ways that release tensions, bringing forth intuition and dialogue, collage-making can offer routes to sharing and enabling intentions that are not reliant on talk, questions or external demands.
Essential materials:
- Newspapers, magazines, unwanted books or any printed materials, cloth, card, bus tickets, anything you can stick together and repurpose.
- Plus A4 (letter sized) card, cardboard or heavy paper.
- Glue stick (or tape) or PVA glue + brush or a little spatula, or any other glue (suitable for paper and card).
- Plus any other materials you may like to use on the day.
Learning Objective Participants Can Expect From This Event
- Broaden your skills-set to welcome creative modalities in your day-to-day, therapeutic communication and process.
- Make time for a playful and joyful process in your therapeutic offering and space.
- Establish connection, thoughtful affinity with clients, and colleagues, and your own creative intuition through an openness towards creative exercises.
Who is This Workshop Appropriate For?
- Therapists, coaches and clients.
How May This Workshop Impact Your Practice?
- Expand your professional offering, create with clients to establish rapport, set goals, and a joyful space for exchanges that are not solely based on words (helpful for clients of different ages as well as those whose first language, or language of choice in therapy, is not English).
Course Content
Presenter
Francesca Bernardi is a writer, advocate, artist and creative coach. She trained in Arts Therapies and Art and Design education and has worked as a teacher and artist-in-residence in schools, Alternative Provision and Further Education. She most consistently engages in multi-disciplinary research, setting up creative environments for critical participatory work with marginalised communities.
Francesca volunteers as an international board member of the Disability Without Abuse Project (Los Angeles), is founding chair of the Antonio Gramsci Society UK, an elected Global Councillor of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA) and Associate Member of CATA (Canadian Art Therapy Association).
Francesca is a Visiting Lecturer in Childhood Studies at Leeds Beckett University and Arts Therapies at the University of Roehampton.
