School of Creative
Industries
Lim Chian Hwee Eunice
Eunice’s transdisciplinary approach to art therapy and art-making is influenced by her rich experiences in various arts, education and social sectors. She enjoys working fluidly within, across and between mediums and materials but has recently found herself gravitating towards natural materials and found objects.
With a background in Global Studies, she is often led by contemplations and questions about transnational issues, shared human experiences, and relations between the human and more-than-human world. She especially finds meaning in experiential, participatory and collaborative art-making processes that breathe and evolve over time, together with the art makers themselves and their worlds. Upon graduating, she hopes to further her interest and specialisation in eco-art therapy.
Work
More Than Human
Dry erase marker on glass
2021
More Than Human is a socially and ecologically engaged art project with the intention of cultivating a deeper, more compassionate relationship between the more-than-human world and ourselves through the practice of intentional and attentive observation. Participants engaged in guided group art-making sessions, individual art-making that focused on awakening the senses and the body, as well as conversations and reflections about their experience. The project synergises with eco-art therapy, which attributes our collective dis-ease to the broken relationship with Earth and seeks to reclaim that connection. The journey is archived at @morethanhuman.project on Instagram and www.morethanhumanproject.wordpress.com. The artwork draws the viewers’ attention to the often unnoticed living beings just outside the gallery by marking out their shapes and lines on the window panes.
Thesis abstract
Eco-art therapy as self care: A novice female art therapist’s reflections on working with a male adolescent serving probation for sexual offending
Self-care is a pertinent topic for those in the helping profession, while the field of eco-art therapy has been emerging in recent decades. This thesis integrates both topics and aims to explore how a novice female art therapist can practise professional self-care through eco-art therapy, while working with a male adolescent serving a mandatory probation order for sexual offending within an institutional setting in Singapore. A qualitative, arts-based, single case study research methodology was employed. The research and analysis shows that practicing eco-art therapy helped the art therapist trainee to contain and reflect upon intense countertransferences, preventing potential burnout and compassion fatigue; remain present and attuned in sessions so as to establish a safe treatment environment and positive therapeutic alliance; recover and regain stability and the capacity to create response art. This thesis recommends that further research be conducted on the effectiveness of eco-art therapy as professional self-care in a different clinical or cultural setting, as well as on a larger scale, with a quantitative methodology.