Amanda B. Allard

Chaos & Containment

I came to Saint-Mary-of-the-Woods Masters of Art Therapy program with a habit of art making and collage journaling. I came with ideas about personal symbolism, with therapeutic work on my shadow and self, and an existential philosophy. I came with the experience of being the client of an amazing art therapist. I came understanding how the final art, my product, changes me irrevocably.

Each year, I’ve started a new art journal integrating weekly assignments, reflections, and self-care art into the journal. I collect the bric a brac from my week and I begin to organize the chaos. You’re taking the tangible objects from your life and collecting them together. I often uncovered my mood and feelings about a topic or week from finishing a collage. I have folders of scraps of life, working and gluing and writing in cozy coffee shops around my city.

This past year has been different. And yet, I am still trying to organize the chaos of my life, but I find myself less attached to the bric a brac. I want to start art making with my mood and feeling at the beginning. I slosh, rather haphazardly, watercolor on paper, making a mess as I like to call it. Not feeling pressured to have something realistic or a representative image, simply a reflection of my mood. Then I go back and organize. I find shapes and I enhance them by containing them. I contain my intense emotions with sharpie markers, gel pens, and my favorite art supply – the white out pen. I realize now that my collage journaling and my “chaos and containment” practice is not so different. I’m organizing and making safe the chaos of life.

During quarantine, in a new apartment that was my own, living alone with my child and living alone, I felt contained. I could help my child with her own big emotions the same way that I had been doing, with chaos and containment. I began to give her watercolor pencils and she began to draw. Then I would give her water and a brush, and let her bring her watercolor to life. At night I would return to her dried and messy emotions, and in the quiet of my solitude I would contain. I would contain her and protect her feelings, even as I knew that I was containing my own about my unexpected life circumstances. We were collaborators in chaos, creators of containment, and learning about our own safe places.

I think that perhaps the most interesting thing about my development as an artist is an understanding that I am the tool of my client, my fellow traveler. I am a safe place, the water color paper that they can show their chaos and the tools, the sharpie marker, gel pens, white-out pens, to help contain, protect and reflect their life. I am both the safe space and the tools. I have an obligation to offer tools, perhaps showing how a tool might work, and watch them create their own variations of “the” tools that will work for them. I am only a tool, a marker, a brush, on their path to creating their art. More importantly I am the container for their art making. It’s a reminder about why my daily practice of art is so critical to my skills as an art therapist. I am a guide; I must know a way, even if it’s not theirs. I am a tool. I am a fellow traveler, a collaborator in chaos, and a co creator in containment.