Radical Creativity : Resisting Clinification
Carla and Mel come together in this multi-modal experiential inquiry workshop to share stories of our own journeys with creative process as a resource, a way of being, and a radical act of resisting clinification in our professional roles as creative arts therapists.
We invite you to engage in your own creative inquiry, considering how creative process infomrs and is embodied in your own life and work.
Together, we offer deep support for the courage required to engage in this way of being.
Expect to move and be moved, witness, respond, generate and create new understandings together through processes of making and sharing.
Collectively, we honour the soul journey of embracing creativity as our birthright, and ultimately, an expression of our divine nature and connection with source.
About Mel
Mel has been building and facilitating community cultural events and interactions for 20 years.
Witnessing first hand the transformative power of creativity and expression, Mel is passionate about inspiring and nurturing an individuals ability to trust themselves and explore their own style.
Mel delivers welcoming spaces, playful events and supportive, educational environments striving to make social change through the positive impact on the individual.
At the heart of Mel’s belief is that creativity is necessary to an individual’s wellbeing and the individual is necessary to community wellbeing.
Melanie is a registered Creative Arts Therapist And Somatic Experiencing Practitioner working with private clients and those referred through NDIS and more. Melanie provides one on one sessions, group and corporate workshops as both an Arts Therapist and Creative Mentor.
Melanie is also a certified Seasons for Growth grief companion offering art therapy and legacy artwork for people in their final transition, and their families. As a certified Deathwalker, Melanie companions those in their final transition and their loved ones through this precious and tender experience.
Mel’s passion is to further develop spaces, ideas and productions to explore the potential of arts based expression, community engaged practice and positive social change.
We are thrilled to welcome Melanie as a facilitator at the 2024 Creative Mental Health Forum and Collective Care Retreat.
About Carla
Carla is an Artist and Creative Arts Therapist based in Boon Wurrung Country, Inverloch, Victoria. She brings decades of experience working with people and the arts for well-being in community, justice, health, education and private practice contexts.
Experiential ways of knowing underpin Carla’s therapeutic work, including embodied attunement and arts-based responding, informed by trauma-centred, strengths-based, existential and narrative approaches. She loves to share creative practices as ways of knowing and being.
Carla’s book Bereaved Mother’s Heart (2007) broke social taboos about maternal grief. Seeing her Stories (2020) presents Carla’s research into making Women’s stories visible through art. She is well known for her publication “Art Therapy First Aid: Growing Capacity with Art Therapists in Communities Affected by Australian Bushfires”(in Scarce, J. (Ed.) 2022), and her most recent article is “Interest, Enablement, Joy, and Meaning: Listening for What’s Life Enhancing About Sharing Our Stories Through Art”, published in PACJA, the Psychotherapy and Counselling Journal Australia.
An educator in the field of Creative Art Therapy since 2001, Carla received an Artist Fellowship at RMIT’s creative research lab, “Creative Agency” in 2018. She is a lead campaigner in the ACTivate Arts Therapy collective, and Founding Director of the Creative Mental Health Forum. Carla insists on being part of a creative revolution in which art re-embodies lived experience, brings us to our senses, makes us aware of the interconnectedness of all life and is an agent of social change.
Carla is the Convenor of the Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia (PACFA)’s College of Creative and Experiential Therapies, and in this role she is dedicated to working for access to creative therapies for everyone.
The documentary of last year's event provides a glimpse into what it means to participate in the Creative Mental Health Forum:
WE WELCOME
CREATIVE THERAPISTS,
ALLIED HEALTH PROFESSIONALS
AND EDUCATORS WHO:
want to learn more about creative mental health,
be inspired by holistic and diverse workshops and presenters,
connect with like minded practitioners,
and “refill your well” with time in a beautiful nurturing environment and space for self care.
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