Everybody makes art at some point in their lives
An interview with Helen Jury, an art psychotherapist, researcher, and practising artist in Britain
The book “Art Therapy in Museums and Galleries: Reframing Practice”, published by Jessica Kingsley Publishers in February 2020 and launched at the National Gallery in London, is the first book to explore and evaluate the potential of museum and gallery spaces and partnerships for art therapy.
Showcasing approaches by well-known art therapists, the book contains descriptions of, and reflections on, art therapy in museums and galleries around the globe. Case studies encompass a broad range of client groups – including people with dementia, refugees, and clients recovering from substance abuse – and explores the therapeutic skills required to work in these settings. The collection also establishes the context for art therapy in museums and galleries through reviewing key literature and engaging with the latest research, as well as considering wider perspectives on how these spaces inform therapeutic practice.
The book is coauthored by British art psychotherapists Alison Coles and Helen Jury, the latter also a researcher and practicing artist herself. Included in the book is Jury’s essay “Further Conversations with Rembrandt in Place, Space and Time: How Rembrandt’s Self-Portraits and the Gallery Setting inform the Art Psychotherapy Review”, an exploration of her own years’-long private relationship with two of Rembrandt’s self-portraits on view in the National Gallery – and in a much broader context, her ideas on “the connection that can be made when viewing artwork in a gallery space and particular artworks on display, and how the possibilities and difficulties around this can inform our understanding of art psychotherapy practice.”
What is it that draws us to particular artworks and provokes us to return to them at particular moments in life? Our conversation with Helen Jury touches upon the role of portraiture in art therapy – as well as its meaning in the life and creative career of the artist himself – and not least of all, on the perspectives on the interaction between art therapy and museums and galleries.
Nowadays we speak a lot about the necessity of synergies between different disciplines as the only way to move forward. What could you say about the perspectives on the interaction between art therapy and museums and galleries?
Well, I think it’s a really interesting field and it’s one that’s been developing for a very long time but has only recently come to the fore, actually, in terms of practice. And ironically, perhaps the COVID pandemic has been quite useful to it. We go to museums and galleries to look at the objects, to look at the pictures, but we also go there to experience both the art and the space. Because of the pandemic, we haven’t been able to do that, everything’s had to go online. Art therapy / art psychotherapy, is something that normally happens face to face, but we’ve taken our practice very successfully as a profession online, so we’re all in it together in terms of what we’re looking for; how we work as populations worldwide and professionally, in terms of understanding mental health. Not just as a result of the pandemic but also generally: there is now an understanding that we need to address health in society more. Health isn’t just physical – it’s mental, it’s emotional, it’s psychological, and it’s overall wellbeing in terms of our level of happiness and sense of satisfaction with our lives. Museums and galleries have a fantastic role to play – not only in terms of mental health provision for participants - but also in terms of reinterpretation of space, objects, and the context of heritage as well.
Health isn’t just physical – it’s mental, it’s emotional, it’s psychological, and it’s overall wellbeing in terms of our level of happiness and sense of satisfaction with our lives.
How would you describe the benefits of the art psychotherapy experience in a museum/gallery setting?
I think it depends on the context in which you’re working. At the moment, I’m researching the touch and handling of objects and materials, and that takes place not only in the art psychotherapy space. In my own practice, I will have a variety of materials available – traditional art materials, such as charcoal, pens, pencils, paints, pastels – and also more commonplace things, such as cardboard, waste, and scrap. And then, of course, you have other more tactile substances, such as clay.
In a museum, we’ve also got objects, and that’s something I’m increasingly employing in my own art practice and art psychotherapy practice so as to allow people to work with a tactile and haptic response. There’s also something about how museums can re-vision their idea of what their collections are for; what their collections represent in the context of objects, and in the context of the function of galleries. How do they work? The two-dimensional, the three-dimensional, what is it that we’re seeing, and how are we seeing it? How does it relate to us? How do we reflect the self in what we see, and how does the self get reflected back in what we’re viewing? It’s a complex process but one I think is exciting, and increasingly exciting to lots of other professionals as well.
What I found really interesting in the book “Art Therapy in Museums and Galleries”, which you co-edited with Ali Coles, was your own research and your own story dedicated to two of Rembrandt’s self-portraits: Rembrandt self portrait at the age of 34, and “Rembrandt, Self-Portrait at the age of 63”, currently on view at the National Gallery in London. From your personal experience, what is the role of portraiture in art therapy?
My personal experience has taken place over a number of years and I still visit Rembrandt and those two particular portraits. I was struck by my response to Rembrandt, and I’m not alone in this. Once I started researching this, I began to discover that there are many people who actually just go to look at the Rembrandts. And there are various people who have written on this. Simon Schama, the British art historian, and art historian John Berger – they have written on there being something about the eyes that Rembrandt represents. There’s also our own sense of being that might be reflected in a painting. Berger makes the interesting comment that a painter can draw his left hand as if it belongs to somebody else; using two mirrors, he can draw his own profile as if observing a stranger, but when he looks straight into a mirror he is caught in a trap: his reaction to the face he is seeing changes that face. Or, to put it in another way, that face can offer itself something it likes, or loves. So, who are we, by comparison or in comparison to the person whose portrait it is? Who are we in the context of our own representation of self? And in the context of the two Rembrandt self-portraits, it was the fascination for me of two portraits that had been painted nearly 30 years apart. One when Rembrandt was in his youth, just 34 years old, and the other just a year or two before he died. What’s the sense of self that’s represented? The same person, but at different points in time. And I think we learn a lot whether we verbalise that internally or externally; we insure it through portraiture as well.
I was struck by my response to Rembrandt, and I’m not alone in this. Once I started researching this, I began to discover that there are many people who actually just go to look at the Rembrandts.
It’s interesting that Rembrandt painted over 80 self-portraits. Did you ever think about what a self-portrait means for the artist himself, in terms of the mental, emotional and also physical state?
Yes. What was Rembrandt searching for, by doing over 80 self-portraits? What was the fascination? I think one of the curious things when you’re making art (and I think this occurs very often for people in art psychotherapy) is that the representation of what is internal process sometimes doesn’t appear as expected on the page or canvas. What you end up representing could be an internalised appreciation of the object – the thing out there - whether it’s the face, the portrait, the self-portrait, or another object that doesn’t correlate with what you think it is. We’re working on different levels psychologically – the conscious and the unconscious – and very often it’s the unconscious that becomes manifest in the artwork. In art psychotherapy, that is obviously something that is enormously helpful to our process of understanding what’s going on for people. Sometimes it’s very consciously manifest, and Rembrandt was particularly good at this. There are some engravings that he did that are quite jokey and there’s one self-portrait where the face is more or less in the dark but the earlobe is highlighted and red. You can see how the detail of what it is that you choose to represent, and what it says about the self, is constantly changing. I think Rembrandt captured this particularly well.
We’re working on different levels psychologically – the conscious and the unconscious – and very often it’s the unconscious that becomes manifest in the artwork.
Sometimes artist self-portraits are a pure abstraction, but you can nevertheless see the personality behind it – you can sense it somehow.
Yes, I think that’s quite fascinating because it also depends on how you work with the materials in the sense of mood that is being conveyed. Is it tranquil? Is it agitated or perhaps even a violent expression? I’m thinking of Francis Bacon’s work – the movement of the material can be very evocative and demonstrate very strong feelings.
In the second half of his life, Rembrandt found himself ostracised by society. Social isolation is also a huge problem today. In some way, a self-portrait is both a mirror of the self and a mirror of others...
In terms of the personal context and how we see the self, that is constantly changing. If we think about the person who’s making art, if they choose to do self-portraiture there’s something about searching for an aspect of self that depicts what it is they’re feeling to the outside world, or even to reflect back to themselves. It’s a complicated process. But certainly, I wonder (and this is perhaps up for debate) whether we’re all isolated, and being in a pandemic has highlighted that, at the end of the day, we’re on our own. However much we relate to other people, however social a person we are, we are only one person. That internal dialogue often isn’t explored. In portraiture, very often the artist and an art therapist, well, there’s some endeavour to discover some meaning of the self. And perhaps with Rembrandt – although I wouldn’t dare speak for Rembrandt [laughs] – it is a sense of suffering that we get in his portraiture. It’s a communicated suffering, an internalised suffering, but he makes it external. I think we relate to that and see it as something that we recognise in the self, and as the viewer.
However much we relate to other people, however social a person we are, we are only one person. That internal dialogue often isn’t explored. In portraiture, very often the artist and an art therapist, well, there’s some endeavour to discover some meaning of the self.
There is this very interesting nuance in the chapter that those two specific Rembrandt portraits at the National Gallery were located in two different rooms, and therefore it was impossible to view them together. What is the role of space, place and time in the therapeutic encounter with art (and from your personal experience as well)?
It was a fascinating time, because the more I visited those two Rembrandt portraits, the more I wanted to see them together, and I would scurry from one room within the National Gallery to another. I often feared that I’d be thrown out because it must have looked odd! But I wanted to try to bring both works together in my mind. And I knew I couldn’t do that. I wonder what it was I was searching for. I think I was trying to relate the experiences that the artist felt in his 20s or 30s to the experiences he felt when he was in his 60s. Of course, those are impossible to bring together because they exist in two different time planes. That’s what set me thinking in art psychotherapy – when somebody creates a work of art, it’s very much about the moment and the space and the time in which they’re existing, in the context of the experiences that they’ve had up to that point. But it also has to exist in the future unknown – the experience we don’t yet know about. To bring that back to Rembrandt: there are athletic, lively and energetic younger self-portraits, and then this very contemplative older self-portrait, which was made just before he died, although he probably didn’t know that at the time. There is a sense of being able to review the younger self as an internal image, yet the younger self can only ever have wondered about the older self. In a sense, my argument would be that they need to remain in different spaces – even if I, at first, wanted to bring them together. Ironically, the parallel in art psychotherapy is that when you’re reviewing the artwork with the client or the patient, you can bring all their artwork together. At that point, time does a very weird thing – it contracts and stands still. You may be viewing personal experiences from a few years ago, but in the context of the present day, in the context of many other artworks made in between, plus a potential future – and this can be very overwhelming, which is why it needs to be worked with very carefully in the therapeutic context.
When somebody creates a work of art, it’s very much about the moment and the space and the time in which they’re existing, in the context of the experiences that they’ve had up to that point. But it also has to exist in the future unknown – the experience we don’t yet know about.
When looking at artwork, we either consciously or unconsciously search for meaning. How can an art psychotherapist help their client in this process, in this co-construction of meaning?
The thing about the artwork that’s made by a client or patient within the art psychotherapy context is that nobody else knows what it means apart from the person who created it. Even they may struggle to know what it means – it may not be possible to articulate it at that particular point. It might only be later, when time has passed and they’re in a different psychological space, that through a co-constructed narrative with a therapist who links various experiences they’ve had in their history and the meanings around those psychologically and emotionally, that there might be some longitudinal view of what their experience signifies for them. But it’s the co-construction of meaning, and it has to be co-construction. No therapist knows what’s going on in somebody else’s mind. They can only work with experience and training and suggest, as they walk along in parallel on that journey, how things might be linked in the context of working with that patient or client.
In your essay in the book, you quote French philosopher Mikel Dufrenne, who says that “artwork and spectator should not be considered as isolated entities but as mutually invested in one another.” How do you see this relationship between artwork and the viewer, and perhaps even broader – in the art therapy context?
I suppose, in a sense, it’s the obvious aspects: Why do we view artwork? Why are we interested? What is it that we think we’re seeing? What are we getting from it? Why is it so essential that we have galleries - national galleries - all over the world? Cultures always make art – we can go from the hand paintings in caves right through to contemporary conceptual work, or performance work that only lasts for a moment. There is something about making experience manifest that is hugely important to the human experience. And if it is important to the human experience, then it has a meaning for us in a way that we can’t necessarily determine, but we know we need to act upon. So, the art making process is massively important. And everybody makes art at some point in their lives. The viewing, I think, again allows us a mirror onto the world, but a mirror on to other people’s worlds as well. It allows us different interpretations, different ways of seeing things. And we value being able to reinterpret our own experience through the eyes of others. An artwork, I suppose, offers that opportunity. Sometimes we can become extremely excited about the form of a sculpture and it can carry some meaning for us; or a material that we feel for some reason encapsulates our experience, but which may not be possible for us to verbalise.
What is this mystery of an artwork? What makes it such a powerful instrument for self-understanding and also for healing in some way? It’s not only a question about form and lines and colours; there is also some kind of resonance...
I think resonance is a lovely word. I think it gives access to something that implies the sort of reverberating experience that psychologically filters through on different levels. But I think it’s interesting that when we talk about an artwork, we’re talking about an apparently finished piece. I would argue that it’s as much in the process of the making of the artwork that we feel the resonance by how we’re handling the materials and what we’re doing with them. In the book, I talk about the idea that somebody may tear apart a piece of corrugated paper and use the undulations for printing. What felt appropriate at that particular time rather than just drawing something, is that it satisfied a need to represent something through a material process that was happening for that particular person. And that process and use of materials, I think, is essential. I suppose you see that in terms of artists who have favoured materials. For example, Rembrandt was a painter, but he also etched. So why did he like etching into a plate, thereby working in reverse? I don’t know. But very often the comment about painting is that it’s the feel of the paint, it’s the manipulation of the paint, its varying degrees of liquidity or stiffness that satisfy an expression. It may not be the final result that becomes important, but the process by which the result is made – it is the process that satisfies a sense of mood change, mood expression, or something about an interpretation of internal thoughts and feelings made manifest.
I think it’s interesting that when we talk about an artwork, we’re talking about an apparently finished piece. I would argue that it’s as much in the process of the making of the artwork that we feel the resonance by how we’re handling the materials and what we’re doing with them.
I recently had an interesting conversation with a Greek artist who said that he believes that a painting (or any other work of art) is finished not at the moment when the artist considers it finished, but when the artist feels that it is the right moment to hang in on the wall and it will resonate with the viewer.
That’s interesting. I feel as a painter - I haven’t painted for a while I use different mediums now, but previously - there was a point at which the painting lived on its own. It had nothing more to do with me. And I needed to step back, and it would carry on and have its own identity. And it was an undefined moment. It was a moment I couldn’t anticipate. And sometimes it wasn’t a very clear moment. But there was always that moment when the painting went its own way and developed an identity. And knowing that the experience of the art making and the artist is in there, but that it has its own form that it can then resonate back to you, that correlation becomes a conversation again.
Are you still working as an artist?
Yes, I’m definitely still working as an artist, but interestingly, the more I research into the touch and handling of materials and objects, the further away I’ve been getting from the actual touch and handling process, which is something I’m trying to fathom. It’s almost as if it’s alive to be involved with the material. I need to view the process of the materials doing things for themselves – how to interrelate and how I can record that as if it’s an “out there” experience that I can view. And maybe that’s a condition of being an art psychotherapist. It’s the viewing part that I want to watch, as process.
What came first into your life – art or psychotherapy?
It is complicated because I always made art; it was a mode of expression. In the meantime, I was always very interested in people. Being very young and wondering why people behaved in the ways that they did, and what had happened to them that they might be feeling what they felt. In a way, the two were always present, I suppose.
Making art is also a kind of self-therapy for artists. Do you agree?
In a sense, I suppose anything that you have your hands on, or in, becomes therapeutic. Or anything that you have your eyes on, or involved with, becomes therapeutic – the potential is there. We’re not very conscious of the fact that the skin is the largest organ of our body, and without our skin we can’t exist. We have two lungs, we’ve got two kidneys, and with today’s science we do pretty well with that. But without skin, we can’t exist. And touch becomes absolutely fundamental. The artistic experience of being involved with something in the making, the tactile interaction, becomes massively important to us. I think it links psychologically more than we’ve perhaps previously explored.
In a sense, I suppose anything that you have your hands on, or in, becomes therapeutic. Or anything that you have your eyes on, or involved with, becomes therapeutic – the potential is there.
If we look back at art history, death and existential questions have been consciously or unconsciously always present in art. Could we say that artists are kind of like mediators who, through their work, remind us about death and provoke us to think about it? And in a way, aren’t we dealing with our own mortality through creating an artwork and also looking at it / experiencing it?
I think we’re back to the human condition, in a sense – we are not very keen on considering mortality. We find it painful; we’re very distanced from death and the sense of mortality, as a society. Increasingly, we’ve lived in a Neverland, fantasy land, in which everything can go on forever; that we can enhance ourselves, live forever, become something magically improved upon. I think some societies are much more grounded in being able to accept that there is a cycle, and therefore it becomes a spiritual journey. There’s solace in believing that there is an afterlife that looks into that. I think in terms of the human condition, very often the making of art is an expression of understanding our own mortality.
I’m going to go back to the museum context here and think about objects. Why do we like objects? Why do we want to keep objects? They represent something of the self and our being in the context of our society and our heritage that makes us feel secure in the here and now; a permanence and a future and also for our posterity. Because, well, artwork might be made in the here and now, but who is our audience? Who are we making it for? Do we expect it to live on? Who knows? Rembrandt arguably knew exactly what he was doing by creating all these portraits. I think there is this response to his artwork: he knew that people were going to be looking at these paintings and he searched for the image, vision or representation that people would want to go back to look at and find meaning in. Mortality is ever present in artwork in some ways.
I think in terms of the human condition, very often the making of art is an expression of understanding our own mortality.
Who knows if Rembrandt thought about it or not, but maybe he knew that through these paintings, he will achieve a kind of spiritual immortality – because in some way, he still lives on. When I interview art collectors, many have admitted that collecting is a way in which they can deal with their own mortality.
I think people are unconsciously terrified that their life will be forgotten, be meaningless, or have no use or function post their own existence. We are more vain than an animal – we have the sort of thinking capacity that allows us to think about who we are and why we’re here. And that also leads to how long, and what we want to be remembered for. Of course, that’s not a general thing. Many people are very humble and accept that we’re here for a short time span. But it is, I think, something that has always been part of the human condition.
Returning to art therapy and the museum context, it’s very interesting that during the first lockdown, many of us searched for art on-line and there really were many projects pointing to how art could help us deal with the situation. In the meantime, the moment that museums opened up again, the usual long lines to get in simply weren’t there. As several heads of major European art institutions have told me in the last few months, museum attendance has fallen.
What is your opinion on this? How can we change this situation, and what is the role of the museum in this new reality?
I think it’s really interesting. I mean, we’ve never ever lived through this sort of situation before. I think perhaps we’re not considering the shock to the human population worldwide about what it means to be isolated, and what it means to be back in community. Also (and obviously people will have different views on this), perhaps we don’t want to be reminded of the hugeness of what it is we are and where we’ve been, and what we might lose if we don’t exist. I think people have struggled on very many levels to come out of isolation. Also, practically, it’s still quite difficult to go to a museum or gallery – you have to book ahead of time, you have to get a visiting time that fits your schedule, you still have to socially distance, etc. I think, on a very practical level, some people feel put off by that.
I also think that during the pandemic there was a (perhaps not coincidental) resurgence of thinking around heritage. What does heritage mean? Whose heritage is it? I think that was probably because we were thinking about who we are, what we were, where we’ve been, what it means to be human, and who are humans. And therefore, what were museums for? Are they for everybody? Is there access for everybody? Museums have been challenged on this score. Who is the visitor to the museum, who should it be? How can a collection be represented to demonstrate a common understanding, rather than a select view that’s a particular historical view? How to draw more people in?
I also think that during the pandemic there was a (perhaps not coincidental) resurgence of thinking around heritage. What does heritage mean? Whose heritage is it?
I think there’s been a massive development of digital interaction, and museums are now thinking more acutely about how to work online, how to look at various other ways of accommodating their collection for people who may not normally visit physically. Time will tell, but I think museums are not what they were.
I think it’s also time to reconsider our relationship with art in general and to rediscover the new, perhaps always present, but forgotten angles.
I think that on that score it’s the painful issues about discovery. Looking now at some artwork that we may have considered to be part of our national heritage can feel shameful – it poses as many questions as it does indicators about particular ways of living. There is something about reassessing the entire work. Like anything, art needs to be looked at in a way that allows for different meanings to come through. That’s very interesting in terms of art psychotherapy, because something that somebody makes at one point: two or three years later they may not remember it at all, even though it was very, very powerful in both the making and the meaning in context. They may not wish to refer to it again consciously, or they may remember the feeling that has been consolidated therapeutically in their understanding through experience after that. We have to constantly be able to come to something anew, and review and re-assess what our experiences are in relation to it. I think artwork may be made in a particular time and place, but there’s not necessarily a static interpretation of it.
Thank you very much.
