BOOK REVIEW – Dr Ariel Moy shares her experience of Carla van Laar’s “Seeing Her Stories”

Seeing Her Stories: An Arts Based Inquiry by Dr Carla van Laar

Review by Dr Ariel Moy

Seeing Her Stories is a surprising book. Carla begins with a simple question: what might happen when a woman’s stories are seen? She then takes the reader and viewer along with her on a rich, heart-felt but also scholarly journey as she explores this question.

Combining conceptual, experiential and arts based ways of inquiry and knowing, Carla invites us into her research process but does so in a way that is highly engaging and human. She generously shares with us her relationships with the women involved in the research, the paints and canvases she used to create their portraits, and the spaces, places and memories they inhabited as she looked deeper and deeper into each woman’s story and their experiences of being seen.

Carla’s paintings inhabit almost every page, as she made them to inquire further into each woman’s story and what it was like to see those stories. She painted to make sense of and come to know more about these stories, including her own, and the paintings show her evolving style and responses to the many women, landscapes, objects, buildings, rooms, recollections and moments in time that drew her to them and asked for expression. In the process, we as readers are also invited to respond to her key question.

I’m loath to give away any spoilers as Carla’s findings are powerful and evocative and you meet them in her writing and her paintings in a way that is deeply personal. Yet, my experience of reading and seeing this book is one of an acute awareness of self and the ways we can be changed by being with art and at the same time, notice what remains constant within.

Art and art making asks us who we are, gives us a safe space to be with whatever answers arise, and gives us time and that is reflected in my encounter with Carla’s book.

I highly recommend Seeing Her Stories. It can be read as a piece of research, but it can also be read as a journey whose end is also a beginning. Carla reminds us that the benefits of arts inquiry and arts therapeutic work can be found in so much more than just the therapist’s room.

Hard copies of “Seeing Her Stories” are available to purchase through book distributors for around $130, however if you would like to order directly through Carla you can purchase your own copy at a discounted $100 including postage.

Contact Carla here to order your own copy: https://carlavanlaar.com/contact/