Art therapy and art as therapy: A necessary reconsideration

The longstanding tension between ‘art therapy’ as a formal, clinical intervention and ‘art as therapy’ as a spontaneous, autonomous act of healing is brought into sharp relief in Internal Landscapes. These works are not produced within a traditional therapeutic alliance, yet they enact therapeutic processes through their very existence, materiality, and reception. In much of Western clinical training, the distinction between art created within therapy and art created as therapy is upheld in order to preserve ethical boundaries and treatment integrity. However, this binary can inadvertently reproduce hierarchies that devalue community-based, culturally embedded, and artist-led practices of healing. In Indigenous contexts, such separations may not exist at all. Art is not an ‘intervention’; it is life, story, and relationship.

McNiff (2004) challenges us to reconsider where and how healing happens, suggesting that the expressive act itself is often more vital than its interpretation. Internal Landscapes supports this claim. The art here is affectively potent, relationally driven, and spiritually grounded. It resists objectification and diagnosis, instead offering portals into lived experience, resilience, and cultural endurance. This calls on art therapists to re-evaluate our frameworks: to interrogate where we place authority, how we define healing, and what forms of knowledge we privilege. It reminds us that art therapy must remain open to other ways of knowing and being, particularly those shaped by Indigenous cosmologies, storytelling practices, and collective histories.

Embodied witnessing and the power of art

One of the most profound contributions of Internal Landscapes lies in its invitation to the viewer not simply to see, but to feel and become an embodied witness. The exhibition disrupts the conventions of detached spectatorship that often define gallery spaces. Instead, it cultivates an environment in which the viewer is asked to be present – emotionally, somatically, and relationally – with the artworks, their makers, and the cultural histories they carry. This kind of witnessing goes beyond visual appreciation. It requires that the body participate in the act of reception, that we allow ourselves to be affected. Viewers may notice a quickening of the breath, a tightening of the chest, a softening in the shoulders – bodily responses to the textures, materials, and spatial compositions on display. These visceral reactions are not incidental, they are integral to the exhibition’s structure and therapeutic power. In this way, the exhibition becomes a site of somatic attunement (Frank, 1995), where body and image co-constitute meaning.

In art therapy, the notion of embodied witnessing is increasingly recognised as a vital part of relational practice (Kapitan, 2014). It reflects the therapist’s willingness to be impacted, to co-regulate, and to share in the emotional and symbolic labour of creative expression. The experience of viewing Internal Landscapes evokes this same dynamic. We are not merely encountering works about trauma, we are engaging with trauma as it pulses, breathes, and unfurls in real time through fibre, pigment, gesture, and form.

The curation itself supports this embodied engagement. Works are spaced to encourage quiet contemplation; the absence of excessive wall text removes interpretive scaffolding, inviting felt responses instead. Silence becomes a curatorial strategy – a space in which emotional resonance can expand. In particular, the use of fibre-based and performative media engages the haptic senses, creating an affective feedback loop between artwork and viewer. Ellis’s felted wool evokes tenderness and repair; Landers’ paper forms rustle quietly with impermanence and care. Wultatinyeri’s maps are not inert, they vibrate with songlines. And Jackson’s performance work compels the viewer to hold their breath, to witness without interruption, to feel the rupture of time.

This process echoes what Baz Kershaw (1999) describes as intensified embodiment in performance; moments in which the boundaries between audience and artist dissolve, allowing for mutual vulnerability. In the context of trauma and healing, such moments are potent. They allow the viewer to experience solidarity with the artist, not in the form of voyeurism or consumption, but in a shared encounter with pain, resistance, and transformation. The affective labour required of the viewer is part of what makes Internal Landscapes so ethically resonant. The act of embodied witnessing here is not passive; it is a kind of relational reciprocity, a way of saying, “I see you. I feel with you.” It disrupts the asymmetry of institutional spaces where First Nations knowledge is often extracted or observed from a distance. Instead, it requires that non-Indigenous viewers enter into a process of accountable presence. This, too, is healing work.

In art therapy, we are trained to create spaces where clients can be seen, heard, and held – where art serves as both container and bridge. Internal Landscapes demonstrates how these same principles can operate within public cultural spaces, offering an expanded vision for how we might think about therapeutic witnessing beyond the confines of the studio. The viewer becomes a participant in the process – not to solve or analyse, but to honour, to hold, and to be transformed through contact.

Ultimately, the power of Internal Landscapes lies in its capacity to elicit not only empathy but also a deepened awareness of relational interdependence. As I stood in the gallery, moved to stillness by the delicate fibres of a wool vessel or the haunting trace of a performance, I was reminded that witnessing is not simply about what we see, it is about how we show up, in body and spirit, to what is being offered.

Figure 4. Anna Ellis, And Yet She Loves Them, 2025, wet felted wool (Corriedale), calico and wool yarn, 1700 × 1590mm. Photograph courtesy of The Dax Centre.

Conclusion

Internal Landscapes is a landmark exhibition in its centring of First Nations voices, its commitment to trauma-informed and culturally grounded practices, and its capacity to move beyond representation into resonance. For those in the creative arts therapies, it serves as a compelling call to expand our frameworks, to decolonise our methodologies, and to deepen our commitment to relational, affective, and culturally situated care. This is not merely an exhibition to be seen, it is an experience to be felt, to be held, and to be learned from. I urge art therapists, students, and scholars to engage with it, not only as professionals but as fellow human beings invited into a sacred space of story, survival, and shared presence.