Art therapy
About the art therapy workshops
Susan Hogan ran a series of workshops using art therapy techniques. These workshops ran from 18 January – 15 March 2010. Participants were encouraged to explore their feelings about, and produce images of ageing in a confidential and supportive setting.
Women were able to use whichever creative medium they wished, whether that was painting, drawing, sculpting, or collage, to create images which represented their feelings about changing and ageing. The information the women provided and the images they created helped to deepen understandings of how older women want to be seen, in all their diversity.
We also involved policy makers and service providers in discussions about the project once it was completed. This helped to challenge many of the stereotypes that exist about older women.
Commenting on the project, Susan said: "I have been developing skills and expertise in creative research methods and this project is very innovative methodologically in terms of its use of art elicitation techniques, phototherapy as a research tool, and community engagement in the arts."
Outputs
Film
The art work shown in this film emerged from a closed interactive-style experiential art group which met for 16 hours over an eight-week period. Facilitated by a registered art therapist (who is also trained in social science research methods), the group utilised techniques from analytic art psychotherapy.
In terms of the overarching research aims of the project, women were active in the production of collective knowledge, as well as active in interrogating their own, very particular, feelings about the process of ageing. This included examining their feelings about media and cultural representations of ageing women.
One of the benefits of participation may be heightened self-consciousness, but participation potentially involved more than mere self-reflection, as through the process of art-making participants are arguably constituting and re-constituting themselves as part of the process.
Gallery
This tissue paper collage was made by one workshop participant who tried to evoke the look and texture of ageing skin.
This is a tissue paper collage made by one workshop participant to try to evoke the look and texture of ageing skin.
This cast was taken of another participants wrinkled elbow and then painted metallic silver.
For the participant who created this, the red and blue represent different parts of the self.
This image is from a series about the ebb and flow of personal energy and fatigue.
This sculpture was made in response to a discussion the women had about the word "crone". The sculpture has a very pronounced chin hair!
One participant wrote a poem - an adaptation of the poem "Warning" by Jenny Joseph - in response to her experiences in the group.
This collage was created to explore nakedness and shows a picture of a woman who has had a masctectomy.
One participant thought of her wrinkles as hieroglyphs, telling her life story.
This image by a participant shows doors closing on a stick figure: "I wanted to express some feelings about restriction and the contraction of my horizons."
This was a collage on the theme of skin made by one participant.
One participants life size drawing shows the discrepancy between how she feels on the inside and how she is seen on the outside.
One participant painted an image of herself fading away to grey.
One participant used a pair of tights to represent the balding pubis.
This image shows one participant's family tree. This same participant also created a costume modelled on her granny's Edwardian outfit.
This participant recreated an Edwardian outfit worn by her granny in an old photograph.
A self-portrait
The woman who made this commented: "You look back at photographs of yourself and you think it’s true, the past is another country, where did that young person go?"
One participant made glass tiles to humourously critique the idea of an ageing barbie.
One woman spray painted a barbie figure silver.
Barbies Bottom Drawer, aged 50
The woman who made this said: "I had a salutary experience last year where someone was directing someone to me and they said: ‘ask the woman with the grey hair’."
The woman who made this said: "It isn’t necessarily that I feel more comfortable in myself because I’m older. Some days I feel OK and some days I see myself and I think who is that?"
The woman who created this said: "Inside the old self are the other layers of people that you’ve been."
The woman who made these two images said: "The two drawings are of a cervix. One has a small drip of blood - I no longer bleed periodically - it was a farewell to all that. The other image is a kind of hello and welcome to a new set of hormonal/ non-hormonal effects."
The participant who created this figure said: "I was thinking about goddesses, those fat, lumpy goddesses you get in Turkey. I added more details over the weeks and she developed nipples and eyes. I’m quite fond of her."