Spring Conference 2009: Lynn Kapitan

After much planning, the spring conference went off today without a hitch. Lynn Kapitan was our speaker, and she did an amazing job talking about a variety of things including her work in South America and her research on re-enchanting art therapy, or making the therapist creative again.

One directive that she gave was to create a monster, our monster (what ever we are fighting right now)

And then to create an environment that both of us could live in

One thing that Lynn noticed in her research is that people often added light to the environment to make things "less scary" and or changed the scale of the monster. In our group, everyone did an element of both of those, making a testament to the power of the directive and of her research.

Another directive that we did called for us to be in groups of 3. In each group we all had a role to play: Creator, Destroyer and Transformer.

The Creator made a piece of art

That the Destroyer then destroyed

And the transformer then made presentable in some form.

It was interesting to see how one reacted in each of the three roles. I for one did not like the creator, for I knew the process and that it would be destroyed. This made me less able to attach to the image. I also did not like the destroyer because I did not like being destructive with someone else's creativity. Of the three I liked the transformer the best although I did feel a lot of pressure to "fix" the drawing in that role.