Putting the Pieces Together

In my studio the other day, I caught sight of an exhibition catalogue that lay on one of my work tables. The exhibit featured a seventy year old South Carolina artist, Aldwyth, who had never before shown her art, but had an amazing store of work reminiscent of Joseph Cornell with a slightly darker flavor. The piece that I fixed on featured a collection of puzzle pieces stained shades of umber and burnt sienna with the printed word "WORK' on all of the pieces. They were glued in a seemingly random pattern inside a wooden box whose narrow lip had fragments of sentences glued to it. As I looked, I began to ruminate on "how things fit together" and decided to put that idea to work in my art therapy group at the hospital. That afternoon, I took four 9" x 12" sheets of watercolor paper and drew curving lines that divided the paper into four pieces. The volunteers and I cut up the paper and quickly realized that we wouldn't be able to put them back together unless we wrote a number on the back and noted "B" for back. Otherwise, people might end up drawing on the back! After we'd cut the pieces up, I wanted to mix them up so that people would not know which piece they had or how it fit back together.

 I could not have anticipated the reaction of both the children and the volunteers. They loved it and covered the pieces with geometric designs, stripes, mandalas, teddy bears and flowers drawn and painted with markers and watercolors. What is it about separated pieces of cardboard or paper that makes someone want to put them back together again? Before the paint was dry, the children and adults eagerly tried to glue them down. The wish to heal, to fix, to mend, to become whole again within the walls of the hospital was made manifest. That wish strikes me as the motivation of most of us; we want so much to gather the puzzle pieces of our lives and see what we can make of them.

Interview with Jan Ferris in Sacramento Magazine

“Davis 7” by Hannah Klaus Hunter

February 2010 If you click on the title above, you can read an interesting view of my work as an art therapist. The interview with Jan Ferris, the writer, took place at time when I had lost many children whom I was close to at the hospital. All were girls, all with some form of cancer. The interview reflects my feeling of darkness at that time and, simultaneously, the capacity of art to carry me on. Using the cloth, bits of paper and paint, I've created panels for each of these children. As Jan noted, I want to express my belief that these lives do matter and do live on in all those who knew them.

Art Therapy with Grieving Children and Adolescents

Check out this SlideShare Presentation:

Art Therapy with Grieving Children and Adolescents

View more documents from gretchen miller.

Coming home to the studio

It's always exciting to return home after vacation to see what the studio has in store for me and I for the studio. It's a complex mix, this relationship. While I've been away, the pieces have been sitting accumulating presence and I've been storing up new ideas. Each moment away is a movie frame; this large leaf, that tree, the way in which a woman wears a strand of pearls. Images are stored to be retrieved in the studio, popping up in a seemingly random order, as in a dream.

Beginning Again

I like thinking about the meaning contained in the book title "Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind by Shunryu Suzuki;" the sense that no matter how many times you've started and stopped a project, you can always begin again. So I am, inspired by the Blastoff class I'm taking with Alyson Stanfield, I'm selecting and clicking away and feeling as if I'm painting with keys instead of a paintbrush. I'm excited about posting entries on a regular basis now that I'm back.

1. Art Therapy at UC Davis Children's Hospital

Art therapy in the pediatric setting not only helps children to cope with the hospital experience, but also allows them to take an active part in their own healing. Art therapy places the value on art as a tool and not as a fine art product. During individual sessions and the daily art group, children engage in a wide variety of mediums and techniques which are both developmentally appropriate, enjoyable and open to the entire family, thus allowing families a place to participate in normal activities.

threads

I'm trying to find a new thread for my work. Last I left off, I was thinking about how to combine the very rough paper quilting with the more sophisticated quilting that I've learned in fabric. The very complicated twists and turns that are possible in cloth are incredibly seductive.

Well, that was interesting and trying to use the panels to carry that out on was a good idea--but time and migraines have slowed all that down. Now, I'm trying to pick up that thread and I'm stuck--or trying to find a thread that will untangle the mass of yarn, the yarn being the mass of possible projects.

As I've turned the loose bundle of yarn over and over in my mind, several thoughts have come to my mind:

1) a small piece of stitched fabric: perhaps about 5" x 8" sewn from of faded stripes of color pieced together.
The references: a shirt that I remember my mother wearing when I was perhaps 5 or 6. the stripes of wide and colored black, watermelon pink, teal and white. This made a deep impression on me, the stripes etched deeply into my visual memory. the second reference is Joseph's "coat of many colors" a reference from Bereshit (or Genesis). I've always found those simple words to be tremendously evocative.

2) The most obvious thread is the migraine, a condition that is trailing along with menopause for me. It's a provocative rather than evocative subject, something I'd rather not deal with but have to. I feel the way I would if someone said something terribly offensive. I'd want to grab them by the shirt collar and let them know just how offensive their words were. In the same way, I want to grab the migraines (or the vessels in my brain and let them know how infuriated I am by their swelling. What would the form be?