Media: Found objects
Population: Children with anxiety disorders
I was visiting my parents this week and was worried because they don’t have a lot of clutter or odds and ends around. I was pleasantly surprised to discover a bag of old metal smithing tools that I may have saved during my undergraduate years and had fun playing and rearranging pieces. I did not intend to keep these pieces together so that I could use them for something else in the future, but I ended up deconstructing a necklace that I found that I had made perhaps a decade ago and adding it to this found object sculpture. I wanted the chain part to hang rather than be held down, so I eventually glued everything down and found a way to hang it in a way that was aesthetically pleasing to me.
In my experience, children enjoy playing and creating with found objects, and Brooker (2010) refers to object theory in this context as children make meaning of the objects around them, often through play. I used to do an Earth Day lesson with my kindergarteners in which parents saved a large Ziploc bag of trash/potential art supplies and sent them in. I also saved my own to contribute or to make up for those who were unable to bring in their own. The process of experimenting and creating with everyday materials was so much fun for my students. I believe that children with anxiety would benefit similarly from such a process, and parents could help them collect things from home to bring in. With such found items, there is no real perceived right or wrong answer which may be comforting. I do think that if there is too much choice in material, it can become overwhelming and anxiety-producing, so I would have to understand how much stimuli a client could handle at once.
Additionally, although I ultimately did glue my objects down, it was very freeing to know that I could switch things around and then just put them away at the end, and this is an aspect of found object art that might appeal to children with anxiety, especially if they have perfectionist tendencies. If they later decide that they love what they created and want to document it and/or glue things down, it is a choice they have the autonomy to make. Brooker (2010) refers to this as a “transitional space”. I also thought about this process and how it might work as an El Duende process of sorts; shifting objects around and documenting them every session.
References
Julie Brooker (2010) Found objects in art therapy, International Journal of Art Therapy, 15:1, 25-35, DOI: 10.1080/174548310037523