Sharing approaches to art therapy with refugees (part 2)
Conversations
InSight – Spring 2025
We invited senior art therapists Bobby Lloyd, Miriam Usiskin and new practitioner prize-winner Jess Gordon to share their approaches to working with refugees by asking each other questions about their articles, published in our journal, the International Journal of Art Therapy.
In this second part, Jess puts her questions to Bobby and Miriam, whose paper explores the large map as an innovative visual art tool in a frontline art therapy project with refugees.
In your article you touch on the cross-cultural nature of art therapy with displaced people. Can you say more about the challenges and opportunities of this aspect of the work?
Jess
Bobby and Miriam: This is an important question and relevant in several ways. We work with people who are displaced from all over the world and we have been exposed to numerous cultures through what we offer. There are differences across age, gender, sexuality, faith, religion, skin colour, ethnicity, inter-cultural complexities, language, socio-economic backgrounds and experience.
While the shortest distance across the English Channel from England to France is only 21 miles, cross-cultural issues are also relevant in relation to our French colleagues. When we travel to northern France, we work in another country with a different language, culture, organisational structures and intentions. Further, most people on the move there want to speak English in their desire to claim asylum in the UK, so in this way we find ourselves privileged as English speakers. However, we ourselves are guests and therefore need to show respect and sensitivity, and acknowledge both our privilege and these complexities.
This is why we have learnt that we need to take an intersectional approach, not only in relation to people who are displaced, but with our freelance team, and across all the services we interact with and within. In order to be fully present we need to be congruent. We adopt an iterative process of ongoing reflection and reflexive action both individually and as a team. We witness a lot of complicated dynamics and inequality, and we need to question what is oppressive, which is not always easy. We have found the need to consider both our own place, and perceived place, in the role of colonialism, racism and the multiplicity of colonial history and experience. We have to be open to listening to this from people who are displaced.
We have been inspired by both Lynn Kapitan’s and Savneet Talwar’s writings about social action and social justice and we know we need an attitude of enquiry and curiosity. We have found that a ‘flatter’, or even what we sometimes call a more ‘democratic structure’, within the work itself works much better than a ‘them and us’ approach.
The Community Table as a model has emerged out of this process, in which we sit alongside people who are displaced as well as with other humanitarian workers, volunteers, security staff, visitors. Introducing artists with lived experiences of displacement into our team has made a qualitative difference to the experience of those who use our spaces, particularly where shared language, tone, history, culture, make it more possible to be inter-relational.
How we communicate across language-barriers and cultures is also something we have had to think deeply about. Sometimes there are multiple languages spoken around the tables or map. We are often not party to what is being said and may have to try to attune to body language, sound, smell, touch. Online translation tools can be helpful when needed and people also translate for each other. Fluid communication is possible, and there is opportunity for an exchange. In these moments, the multiplicity of voices settles as the shared endeavour of engaging in art-making takes over.
I was struck by the use of the map not only to connect fragmented personal narratives, but also to represent an imagined future, so that the ‘non-place’ inhabited by the displaced person in transit can be reimagined as an ‘I am here’ spot that is part of an ongoing and meaningful story. Can you share what you have learned from your own processes of transforming the ‘non-place’ into a ‘safe space’ where you can engage in meaningful work as an art therapist?
Jess
Bobby and Miriam: This question touches the heart of what we do. We have learnt a myriad of things, holding in mind the idea of Portable Studio (Kalmanowitz and Lloyd), alongside the innate mobile nature of our practice in which we have to carry the materials, the theoretical underpinning and the ideas into spaces which we ourselves need to inhabit first before we can make them usable by others.
Short film: Portable studio, Bobby Lloyd and Debra Kalmanowitz (2021)
Having unfolded the table, laid down the map and created the conditions for something to happen, we then need to be led by those in front of us. Our intention isn’t necessarily to help people who are displaced make meaning. We follow their lead so that our brief encounters can become meaningful and part of their story – or not.
The rhythm and regularity of the work is significant, even if contact with individuals is fleeting. By revisiting sites again and again, we find our own ways to occupy them, and have found that a culture has developed over time which we can make use of.
The arrival, unpacking, grounding, delivery, packing up and leaving the site is aided by the principles of ‘Look Listen Link’ (Psychological First Aid (PFA)), which we actively use in each setting both for ourselves and with our partners. Conviviality and kindness alongside thinking about the aesthetics of the space further help to make a space into a place that can be inhabited for a period of time.
You describe your article as, in a way, ‘a call to action’. What action, if any, have you particularly noticed in the art therapy world since this article was written and what action would you most like to see?
Jess
Bobby and Miriam: This is a great question and may not be for us to answer. However, an important action we would like to see is attention to the materiality within art therapy practice and an urgent plea to the profession to look at the materials we use with a questioning and intentional focus: should I be using this media and material with this individual or group, and why? Asking about the intentionality for the work can help this process. We follow our instincts as artists, actively allowing our artistic creativity into the forefront, but we need to bridge this with and ground it within nuanced and reflective psychological thinking.
A second action relates to a world in which waste is endemic and climate emergency a present and terrifying reality that will directly contribute to more people being displaced. We therefore need to be questioning the source of our materials, the labours and conditions for workers that their misuse might contribute to, and so on. Reusing materials – sourcing old stock, found objects, pre-used tools and reusing these resources – is now core to the practice of Art Refuge across all of our sites.
While the materials are robust and regularly reused, the temporary, even fleeting nature of our interactions with people, alongside our own attention to the processes that surround these interactions, has meant that the storage of artworks is often not relevant. Instead, art activity is documented on mobile phones. Following a more co-produced approach to our work, including what happens to the artwork, aligns not only with our own ethical boundaries but is now highlighted in the updated HCPC guidelines published last year.
A third action is for art therapists to consider the careful use of social media (in our case Facebook, Instagram) as a viable and valuable extension of the work with people using our services. Our use of social media isn’t new, and the article we are discussing was written in 2019 and published in August 2020, a few months into the Covid-19 pandemic, when we also witnessed an important turn towards online tools and different ways of working, connecting and communicating for art therapists. Whether or not it has taken off due to the pandemic, the use of social media is certainly now taking form across the international art therapy profession in all sorts of interesting ways.
View this post on Instagram
Our way of working shows different ways of engaging people who are otherwise disenfranchised and often disaffected. We see that the possibilities for art therapy are huge.
Finally, we might reflect this question back to you and the reader: what do you think?
Read part 1
You can read Bobby and Miriam’s questions to Jess in our previous issue of InSight.
Read the articles
If you’re one of our members, you can read the articles in the International Journal of Art Therapy by Jess, and Bobby and Miriam, for free through your memberzone.
- Longing and belonging: making mobiles in art therapy with young Ukrainian refugees Jess Gordon, International Journal of Art Therapy (2023)
- ‘Reimagining an emergency space: practice innovation within a frontline art therapy project on the France-UK border at Calais’ Bobby Lloyd and Miriam Usiskin, International Journal of Art Therapy (2020)