Goldsmiths, University of London: Journals Online
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The Art and Practice of Providing On-line Art Therapy to Children during the Covid-19 School Shutdown
Get PDFThis paper describes the author’s experience of providing on-line art therapy for four months via Zoom during the school closure in Spring 2020, necessitated by the spread of Covid-19. The author describes how the shift in working style led to a change in the dynamic of the art therapy which brought benefits including the need for the client to take greater responsibility for facilitating the sessions and a renewed engagement with the art work. Despite this, anxiety in the therapist grew as the loss of the artwork and the art room led to a fear of a failure of the container and also that important transference and communication was being lost. Despite new dynamics and a shift in the work seen with several children, the quality of the connection was reducing over time as fatigue, complacency and boredom set in. The benefits to the changes could only be fully realised once we had returned to in-person art therapy and overall the author was left with the sense of her practice being compromised and reduced by the need to work in isolation. She did, however, benefit from the opportunity to reflect in depth on isolation and her responsibilities as therapist. 
Covid-19 Creativity or Collapse
Get PDFA few days before lockdown, a service user I was working with took their own life, it was the final shocking act of a long, painful, irresolvable journey for us both and I was shaken to the core of my identity as an art therapist and in many ways as a human being. Perhaps in some way this made the total shut down of ordinary life more bearable. The clocks had stopped for everyone with the collective shock of Covid, and I needed some time to think, read, reflect, and grieve
Creativity as a Lifeline: connection through witnessing
Get PDFThe weekly Accountability Art Project was the product of a chance meeting at an art exhibit to honor Doris Arrington, the founder of the art therapy department at Notre Dame de Namur University. The conversation revealed a common theme that each of us were noticing – a lack of personal art making. The project began as accountability art: a pledge, between three art therapists, to complete one piece of art per week
Book Review: Making Sense by Martin Stanton
No full textAre we being taken for a ride? Certainly. Stanton audaciously unzips and spills the traditions of radical psychoanalytic thought into the here and now, unleashing lines of flight from the vital forces of art, dream, humour and imagination into the therapeutic enterprise. Creating an ‘incessant carnival of insane and inspired improvisation’, (Chesterton 2007 in Beaumont 2020 p131) the book travels from the proverbial sublime to the ridiculous, but it is absolutely no joke. By taking the risk of ‘joining a lineage of great works which mix up abstractions fit for an epic with fooleries not fit for a pantomime’ (Chesterton 1909 in Beaumont 2020 p131) Stanton provides food for thought, puzzle and inspiration which will be welcomed by all therapists who are trying to make sense of a world that is increasingly out of order
‘Very Prejudicial to the Service of the Revenue’: The British Army on Coastal Duty in Eighteenth-Century East Anglia
Get PDFThroughout the eighteenth century, one of the main peacetime functions of the British Army was to supplement the Customs in combatting smuggling, but it remains little studied. The article aims to explore the structural features of the cooperation between the British Army and the Customs service on coastal duties by giving particular emphasis to matters of potential conflict. A second aim is to study such matters for the East Anglian counties. The article ultimately aims to show that while successful coastal policing depended on the cooperation between the Customs and the army, the supposedly frictionless cooperation was anything but straightforward
Ends of Worlds: An Introduction by the Guest Editor
Get PDFThe phrase about the ‘ends of the world’ is familiar enough, not just to readers of the Bible, where it appears amid dire warnings about temptation in 1 Corinthians 10:11, but of course also from Pater’s quintessentially decadent description of the Mona Lisa, where the biblical quotation is taken splendidly out of context to evoke a modern sensibility, the very ‘symbol of the modern idea’,[i] as he writes, a sweeping together in the knowing countenance of a Renaissance portrait all human temptations, all spiritual and worldly aspirations, whole networks of global trade and cultural exchange extending back much farther than those mere thousand years, extending not just to various nations and continents, but also to the depths of the sea and the secrets of the grave. Pater evokes one fallen empire after another as he deftly, if improbably, refigures Mona Lisa as a pearl-diver, a silk-trader, a goddess, a mother, even a vampire. At the droop of that weary eyelid, he is reminded that ‘modern philosophy has conceived the idea of humanity as wrought upon by, and summing up in itself, all modes of thought and life.’[ii] So many ends of worlds in a sublimely weary eyelid! Decadence is ostensibly a theory of the end of a world, but it has a way of collecting worlds without end. Pater elsewhere challenges us to see the visible outlines of the face as ‘a design in a web, the actual threads of which pass out beyond it’,[iii] extending indefinitely, beyond imagination – and yet continuing to twitch and vibrate like delicate nerves, transmitting messages we can scarcely begin to read.
[i] Walter Pater, The Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), p. 80.
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] Ibid., p. 150
Baudelairite et réversibilités
Get PDFNous avions, du temps où j’étais enfant, un exemplaire des Fleurs du mal dans la bibliothèque familiale. C’était un gros volume au papier épais. Sur la couverture, la longue chevelure sombre et la robe noire d’une silhouette de femme tranchaient sur un fond flamboyant. Ce pastel, je le revis plus tard au Petit-Palais, c’était Sur champ d’or de Charles-Lucien Léandre
Baudelaire: Le Cygne
Get PDFBy ten, it was too hot to go on with our walk. We were out on the scree of Tilos, at that stage of the 1970s still one of the least visited of the Dodecanese. It isn’t that far from the Turkish mainland, but the only means of getting there had been in a small fishing-boat, two hours of rocking and rolling from Symi, the nearest island.
The three of us had breakfasted on yoghurt and honey and set off before eight. We intended to keep going until midday, then find a cove and spend the afternoon swimming. A dangerous misjudgement, what with the sun already on fire directly above us
So you want to write on Les Fleurs du mal… Some notes on reading Baudelaire in the era of Covid
No full textIt never fails, making each time we arrive at that point in a term where Baudelaire appears on the syllabus a slightly uncanny pedagogical experience, one not entirely unlike that of reading the poems themselves anew. Each time one notices the same, different thing, or the same thing, differently: if there is a poet that the average undergraduate student in a French literature course appreciates, even if for reasons for which they, too, like me, often fumble to find the right frame or articulation or understanding, it is Baudelaire. Whatever the explanation may be, next to Les Fleurs du mal, Les Contemplations generally doesn’t run much chance of ending up among the stack of end-of-term papers (perhaps thereby proving one of Benjamin’s opening points from the Motifs essay: whatever ‘the lyric’ was – its epideictic function or role, perhaps – has undergone an irrevocable cultural change). ‘Why do you want to work on Baudelaire?’, I find myself asking, perhaps somewhat convinced that the earnestness of the question is at least partly due to the fact that, each time, I both am and am not really asking it of them but of myself
It’s hard to like Baudelaire
Get PDF‘It’s hard to like Baudelaire.’ We were looking at an exhibition. In glass cases, there were copies of Les Fleurs du mal in all the languages the curator – no doubt pressed for time – had been able to track down. The books were pinned at an angle, like butterflies, but in no obvious order, slumbering in the heat of an Athens afternoon… the titles: some you could easily recognize, others you might guess at, others, dustier than all the rest, were lost in the outer regions of unknown languages, unknown scripts that could have disguised anything. Las flores del mal, I fiori del male, As Flores do Mal, Ta Anthi tou Kakou