MA Art Therapy Artist in Residence lecture: Seeing Her Stories

Dr Carla van Laar is the Artist in Residence for the MA Art Therapy programme in the School of Creative Industries from 3 to 7 February 2025.

Seeing Her Stories combines Dr van Laar’s fascination with the power of seeing artworks, commitment to sharing women’s stories through art and interest in discursive perspectives. This research adds layers of meaning to understandings about what happens when artworks are made, shown and seen.

Dr van Laar examines complex intersubjective relationships between people and artworks, in which seeing is at once a sense activity, a relational process and a discursive practice. The findings of this inquiry have implications for how students, practitioners, employers, institutions and participants conceive of what art therapy can be.

This will be an interactive lecture, in which attendees are invited to engage in seeing and responding to artworks, and co-create some shared understandings together.

About the speaker

Dr Carla van Laar (Doctor Therapeutic Arts Practice, Master Creative Arts Therapy, PACFA Clinical Registrant, PACFA Accredited Supervisor) is an Australian-born, Gen X, cishet woman of European descent, a mother of two, an artist and Creative Arts Therapist based in Boon Wurrung Country, in the small coastal town of Inverloch, south-eastern Australia.

She brings decades of experience working with people and the arts for well-being in community, justice, health, education and private practice contexts. Dr van Laar has lived experience as the parent of a child with disabilities and a life-limiting condition, and it was during her first-born son’s life that she was introduced to the life-enhancing potential of creative arts therapies. She has worked with people who have disabilities since 1991 and continues this supportive one-to-one work today in her Inverloch-based art therapy studio.

Experiential ways of knowing underpin Dr van Laar’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.

Dr van Laar’s book Bereaved Mother’s Heart (2007) broke social taboos about maternal grief. Seeing Her Stories (2020) presents Dr van Laar’s research into making women’s stories visible through art. Her chapter 'Art Therapy First Aid: Growing Capacity with Art Therapists in Communities Affected by Australian Bushfires' (in Scarce, J. (Ed.) 2022) has been internationally influential in the field of disaster response. Her recent article explored, interest, enablement, joy, and meaning, and encourages therapists to listen carefully to participants to learn what’s Life Enhancing About Sharing Our Stories Through Art (2023). Her latest publication What’s Beneath Our Feet? Cultivating Cultural Awareness Through Arts-In-Nature with Australian Children and Young People, is co-authored with First Nations Artist, Melissa McDevitt Weston (2024).

An educator in the field of creative art therapy since 2001, Dr van Laar 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. 

Dr van Laar 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.