The WAI Way of Working
Our kaupapa
Our WAI kaupapa recognises the history of oppression, colonisation, and patriarchal power in Aotearoa, New Zealand, and acknowledges the ongoing, shifting nature of these discourses. We challenge misinformation and misrepresentation and the authority of others over our realities.
WAI focuses on creating an environment where women are safe and have autonomy. We are safe to share our experiences through art making, safe to talk - or not talk, to make art or just drink coffee - safe because everyone in this environment has experienced violence.
Making art together places the focus on our creativity - not our vulnerability, our brokenness, or our resilience. WAI upholds our dignity through the ongoing acknowledgement of our resistance to this violence (a Response Based Practice approach), an active engagement in art making, and an ethic of care or manaakitanga.
Our art work is about us – our experiences, our responses to these (and other people’s responses to us), our identities, relationships, and our desire to see social change. To date the artworks produced by WAI overwhelmingly demonstrate our dignity, our resistance, and our empowerment. They also share the sadness and darkness of this violence, but in a way that has surprised and moved viewers, because of its colour and positivity. WAI like to take the negatives and flip them on their heads – whose shame is it anyway? Not ours.
WAI is insider facilitated – it is not an art ‘class’ with a ‘teacher’, as this would create a power dynamic that would preclude collectivism. The WAI facilitator is also part of the collective and will make art (or not) as she wants or is able to. Learning about art happens – and everyone in the space can share their art making knowledge if they would like to. Specialised tutors can come in but you will be able to opt out of these sessions if you don’t feel comfortable about being there. The art making is flexible and open – you can make or do what you want to (within reason and depending on the budget!).
The WAI kaupapa is based around participatory art making – not art therapy. To offer art as therapy would suggest that there is a brokenness, problem, or deficit that someone more whole or well could heal. Working in this way potentially sets up a power imbalance that lowers one person (the client) below another (the professional), and places the focus on art as a way of discussing, mending, or healing the brokenness. This way of working totally shifts the focus from our creativity and our resistance to this violence and from all we have done to remain whole and uphold our dignity. The word whakaiti can mean violence or abuse in Te Reo Māori (the Māori language) – but it translates literally as ‘to make small’. As women who have experienced violence we know this diminishing approach well – violence is all about power and control - therefore it is crucial that WAI challenges any potential power imbalance. However, we do acknowledge that our collective art making gives us a voice, people who get it, and often just makes us feel good!
A body of literature sits around this concept of participatory art-making within the mental health sector (Brown, 2015; McKeown, Hogarth, Jones et al, 2012; Niadoo, 2005; Parr, 2007 & 2012, Spandler, Secker, Kent, Hacking and Shenton, 2007, 2008 & 2012, Stickley, 2010). The preconceptions around many people viewed as ‘patients’ led Brown (2012, in Stickley, 2010) to conclude that art as medicine or therapy “formalised and diminished art just as much as the codices of mental illness, adding seemingly impermeable layers of labelling and disempowerment” upon those who were already stereotyped and marginalised.
Parr (2012) acknowledges the crucial importance of community art-making outside of the clinical setting and interpretation of therapeutic approaches. This understanding is also corroborated in relation to the ‘victims’ of violence by Jury (2009, p.60) who states that “social change arguably lies outside the scope of any therapeutic or supportive relationship”. If participatory, community art making dignifies and empowers those who are described as ‘mental health patients’ then why can it not offer those same benefits to women who have experienced violence?
