Art and Expressive therapies use colour sound movement gesture and materials like clay, oil pastels, watercolour and sandplay to express emotions and ideas and create new opportunities and new meaning. Many people are happy to hear that absolutely no artistic skills are needed.

Together we focus is on healing and use the art materials in any way you enjoy to express yourself and recover.

Art Therapies can be especially useful if words do not come easily and talking therapy is difficult. It is often used for children and can be used for building general well-being and emotional literacy (identifying feelings and naming them and understanding them). It can also be useful for doing deep therapy to transform strong and overwhelming emotions and healing trauma without re-traumatisation.

Art therapies can enhance brain plasticity and mind body emotion regulation and healing.

Clients who have complex health issues such as strong pain, fatigue or overwhelming panic often report that art especially watercolour and sandplay are very gentle ways to improve mental well-being.

Art materials offer a really simple way of externalising a problem – put it on a canvas or in a sandtray or make it in clay and look at it. You can then physically move it about, look at it from different angles and change things – This offers you a sense of mastery and being able to manoeuvre a problem and see it differently can open up creative solutions and alternative ways of understanding and feeling.

Each Art Modality has particular strengths:

• Clay is strong and great for transforming anger and healing neglect
• Water Colour is gentle and wonderful for grief and loss and chronic fatigue
• Oil Pastels are bright and help when building resilience and resourcefulness
• Sandplay brings new perspectives and creative solutions and helps planning a path forward