Dr Carla van Laar – Artist and Creative Arts Therapist

Artist’s Statement

I pay my respects to the Boon Wurrung People, on whose traditional lands this exhibition takes place. I honour them, their elders and ancestors. They have inhabited, cared for, gathered on and practiced Culture here on Country for millennia. This will always be their land, waterways and atmosphere.

Receiving a Welcome to walk freely around in this Country has provided me with a sense of belonging that, as a descendant of European settlers, I never expected to experience. For this I am deeply and eternally grateful.

The artworks in this show were painted here in Boon Wurrung Country, Inverloch. 

My painting practice is deeply connected to my sense of being in relationship with the living world that I inhabit and that sustains all life. When I am painting, I am participating in the act of creation that is the nature of the universe. In these ways, being in connected relationship with the environment, through the contemplative process of painting, is a life sustaining and spiritual practice.

I hope that some trace of the sense of each place, and the creative life energy of the universe, remains in every painting I make, and that the artworks transmit this energy to others as part of their ongoing purpose in life.

Artist’s Biography

Carla van Laar is a painter and Creative Arts Therapist from Australia. Born in Brisbane, Carla is first generation Australian on her Dutch grandparents side, and 7th generation through her maternal bloodline who were mostly English and came to Australia in the early colonisation of the 1800s. Her mother grew up in remote North Queensland and most of her extended family live up North. Carla lives and works in Boon Wurrung Country in Inverloch, South Eastern Victoria. 

Carla has exhibited her artworks consistently since 1990, and her artworks are held in private collections as well as the collections of the National Australia Bank and RMIT University. She has over 30 years’ experience working with people and the arts for health and well-being in community organisations, justice, health and education contexts.

Carla’s first book “Bereaved Mother’s Heart” was published in 2007 and broke social taboos about maternal grief. From 2008-18 she established and ran an independent art therapy studio and gallery in Melbourne. Her Doctoral research “Seeing Her Stories” continues the mission to make women’s stories visible, through art.

Carla has lectured and supervised Art Therapy students at RMIT, MIECAT and currently the IKON Institute. In 2018 received an Artist Fellowship at RMIT’s creative research lab, “Creative Agency”. She 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.