Looping, Knots, Getting Stuck
Looping: to coil, to encircle, to travel back to the starting point, meandering in cycles.
This piece was created when I was given the opportunity to make something (whatever I wanted) in art therapy training. As a student I had a whole art room of supplies to work with and I didn’t feel any burning problem or discomfort that I wanted to inquire into so I just meandered over to the organised jumble of materials and pulled out some items that felt comfortable.
I pulled together some yarn and started to play. I was enjoying the process of creating something without any particular thought process guiding me. Soon, I was asked to stop and my fellow student started to describe without value judgments what she saw in front of her. Looping, knots, twists and turns, looping back on itself, meandering lines that form a closed pattern. Some loops were “inked” into the paper, other loops were “stuck down” with tape. I agreed with her. That was indeed what I had created. Sure my meaning-making mind could (and did) say it saw flowers floating upwards and that would also be true.
Instead of getting sidetracked with interpretation, we stayed with the descriptive perceiving and then sat in silence gazing at my creation. As if I had been poked with a stick, a pattern of my own emotional looping, knotting and getting “stuck down” came to my mind and I shared this with my fellow traveller. The story now emerging out of my art wasn’t one of spring-like gaiety and airy femininity. My art, through my own handiwork was reminding me of a pattern I was repeating, over and over and over and here I was making it, demonstrating it in the material world with no conscious effort on my part.
Interestingly, in my life outside of the classroom I was pricked by the awareness of my own looping and was growing more deeply dissatisfied with it, but I was also hoping the trajectory of my actions would lead to growth and change, to a “spring”. As we looked at my image through the lens of description, it jolted me out of complacency and motivated me to take a different action. Action that was more grounded and rooted in the soil of my experience, no longer floating in my imaginative never-land.