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 our 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.
Glues stick (or tape) or PVA glue + brush or a little spatula, or any other glue (suitable for paper and card).
Optional: scissors, paper cups, small vessels/containers.
Your joy and 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, establishing connection, thoughtful affinity with clients, and colleagues, and your own creative intuition through an openness towards creative exercises.
- Expand your professional offering, create with clients to establish rapport, set goals and establish a nurturing 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, is not English).
Who is This Workshop Appropriate For?
- Therapists, coaches and socially-engaged practitioners working with individuals, couples, groups and colleagues in the helping professions. Especially if you have a desire to reengage your own creative potential.
How May This Workshop Impact Your Practice?
- Rekindle your creativity and engage your multiple communication tools, to welcome creative modalities in your day-to-day, therapeutic work and process, making time for a powerful and joyful process in your therapeutic offering and space.
Coaches and therapists, and clients wanting to express ideas in visual, textual and tactile ways.
Course Content
Presenter
Dr. Francesca Bernardi PhD is an advocate, author, coach, and artist, with expertise in MA supervision, dis/ability and community engagement. Francesca has an extensive background as a teacher and artist-in-residence, working with children and adults in various settings, including schools, alternative provision, further and higher education, corporate settings, museums, and public spaces (Tate Museums and the RSA.org). She’s dedicated to working with parents and caregivers of children and young people with dis/abilities who have experienced school exclusions and other forms of social discrimination.
Francesca engages in multi-disciplinary and arts-informed practices with marginalized communities, and individuals experiencing loss and homelessness. Her approach is non-hierarchical, socially just, and creative, aiming to nourish healing and personal agency while honouring the wholeness of individuals’ personhood, choices, and capabilities.
Francesca has published her work on autism, arts-informed methodologies, childhood, and children’s rights in books and journals (Bloomsbury, Routledge, Taylor and Francis). She is the founding chair of the Antonio Gramsci Society UK, board member of the Disability Without Abuse Project (2020-), and an Associate Member of CATA/ACAT (the Canadian Art Therapy Association 2021-).
