Art and Psychotherapy

Art & Psychotherapy is a book project (forthcoming with Oxford University Press) that arose from a conference held at Birkbeck in 2022 supported by the UKRI. It interrogates the relationship between art and art therapy, examining the roles of artist, service-user artist, amateur artist, outsider artist and non-artist. Though the question ‘what is art’ is rote, the utilisation of art as therapeutic endeavour, championed by therapeutic communities and supported by institutions, tugs at the boundaries of meaning of art via its maker and the maker’s ‘location’. Though many so-called outsider artists are not service users or, more specifically, art therapy patients, their positioning as both artists and not-artists gives a pertinent example of the slipperiness of the category of artist – someone on the ‘inside’ of an ‘art world’ and yet in close proximity to ‘insanity’ and outsider-ness. This interdisciplinary project brings together scholars from arts-based practice, art history, history of the human sciences, and psychosocial studies to reflect collectively on the following research questions:

What kinds of subjects does the field of art therapy produce?

What is produced in art therapy?

How does the field of art therapy envision its relationship to contemporary art and artistic practice?

In what way is ‘the artist’ (and more specifically, different categorisations of artists) a particular kind of subject for psychology?

How can art therapy produce wellness when the figure of the artist is so commonly modelled as ‘unwell’?

This project is a collaboration between Dr Sasha Bergstrom Katz (Birkbeck/Bielefeld), Prof Suzanne Hudson (University of Southern California) and Dr Sarah Marks (Birkbeck)