Why (WAI) art making?
What happens to us once we are over the crisis and out there on our own away from the violence?
Walking Away
Walking away from the advocacy, the safe house, education programmes, and many of those who have supported us through the ‘crisis’ is generally positive – it may mean we are heading into a safer space. Society expects us then to get on with our lives as ‘survivors’, and put this traumatic time behind us. But we walk back into a world where our experiences of violence marginalise us and make us different. We sit uncomfortably within a society which ignores, minimises, and excuses what has happened to us. Our private realities will not match the public perception of us as “vulnerable victims” or “brave survivors” of violence. Our resistance to this violence will be hidden, minimised, unacknowledged, and ignored. We will rarely have the chance to represent our own stories because experts and spokespeople will speak for, to, and about us. We will be seen as too ashamed or damaged to speak for ourselves. This is our reality, and it doesn’t change no matter how long ago this happened to us.
Challenge stereotypes
How do we challenge these stereotypes and assert ourselves as whole people when our identities have so often been defined by the media, police, medical practitioners, psychologists, social service agencies, our ex-partners, our families, and those outside our lived experiences?
Sharing these narratives of violence is an immensely difficult proposition. If we talk to others we run the risk of being misunderstood, misrepresented, shamed, or even blamed for what has happened. Research backs this: Jones (in Hogan, 2012) discusses the difficulty of women sharing their narratives of abuse with friends and family or wider society and acknowledges the unbearable weight of pain and disgust these narratives may cause others. The difficulty of voicing experiences of violence is also acknowledged by Jury (2009) and Walton (2010).
Self-represent
The social responses we receive to these disclosures have a profound impact on the way we see and recover ourselves after violence. The language which sits around this violence holds such an emotionally meaningless weight that it fails miserably in capturing our lived realities. For example: the word “rape” can never portray the reality of being raped.
How can women speak of these unspeakable acts of violence in a way that is socially acceptable? If we cannot share these core experiences with ‘outsiders’ then how can we feel connected and empowered, or even understand what has happened to us? Our avenue becomes silence. If you don’t talk then you are not judged.
Art making (as opposed to art therapy) offers an opportunity to self-represent these experiences without the need for words. Art making about our experiences allows us the autonomy of speaking for ourselves, showing our experiences from our perspective, in a way that does not further disempower or pathologise us.
Social change
Art making as a collective, where we can remain anonymous if we choose to, holds even more power. The solidarity experienced in making art together is viewed by Levine and Levine (2011) as essential to the restoration of kinship and the sense of being part of a living community; “the arts are also capable of holding the experience of mourning what an individual or group has lost. Mourning and celebration are two essential ways in which art-making can touch the essence of being human. Both our tears and our laughter can hold us together” (p.29). If this solidarity is with others who know violence then there is no careful tip-toeing around – we can speak openly and understand readily.
The potential for social change inherent in the power of image making offers not only a mediation between individuals and collectives but also between “cultural, universal, transpersonal and personal meanings” (Jones, 2012, p.48) - it may demand responses to injustice. In this way art becomes not only a voice for us, but a social action – a way of creating change, challenging the stereotypes and myths that sit around who we are and what the lived reality of this violence was like. It is an opportunity rarely afforded us.
