Building a Visual Vocabulary: An Art Therapist’s Self-Inquiry into the Poetics of Found Material

Found material offers many benefits to the artist who chooses to use it. Not only is it environmentally sustainable, found objects can provide a sentimental and nostalgic quality for the artist to engage with. The experience of finding an object in one’s environment can help cultivate a sense of connection to place and foster a sense of curiosity. Allowing oneself to project this nascent emotional content onto the found object and ascribe meaning to it can generate art material that has a self-imposed poetic quality. This meaningful material can then be creatively manipulated in aligment with the projected emotional content, propelling transformations from within and without. This research, using an art-based heuristic self-inquiring approach, seeks to explore and investigate the potential for self-reflection and self-insight through the creative use of found material. The artist-researcher examines how the process of engaging in her environment through mindful walks and collecting found material can facilitate processes of self-awareness and emotional regulation. Through guided meditation and reflective writing practices, the found objects become imbued with meaning and worked with creatively in the artist-researcher’s studio. Once complete, the artworks are further reflected upon in order to construct a sense of meaning out of the experience. This research presents an intimate account of the artist-researcher’s experience working with found materials and reveals the potential for the proposed art-based process to facilitate self-awareness, self-reflection, emotional regulation, and self-insight. Based on the findings, this art-based intervention could potentially be applicable in an art therapy context