Making Sense: Art Practice and Transformative Therapeutics

Making Sense utilises art practice as a pro-active way of thinking that helps us to make sense of the world. It does this by developing an applied understanding of how we can use art as a method of healing and as a critical method of research. Drawing from poststructuralist philosophy, psychoanalysis, arts therapies, and the creative processes of a range of contemporary artists, the book appeals to the fields of art theory, the arts therapies, aesthetics and art practice, whilst it opens the regenerative affects of art-making to everyone. It does this by proposing the agency of 'transformative therapeutics', which defines how art helps us to make sense of the world, by activating, nourishing and understanding a particular world view or situation therein. The purpose of the book is to question and understand how and why art has this facility and power, and make the creative and healing properties of certain modes of expression widely accessible, practical and useful.

Table of Contents:
List of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgements Introduction Part I: Transformative Therapeutics as Healing for the Individual 1. Making Sense of the Aesthetic Experience 2. Making Sense Inside the Clinic: Episodes of the Arts Therapies 3. Contesting the Clinic: Art, Therapy and the Schizophrenic 4. Making Sense Outside the Clinic Part II: Transformative Therapeutics as a Critical Method of Thinking 5. Making Sense of Territory: Art Practice and Material Thinking 6. Making Political Sense: Vera Frenkel's String Games 7. Making Sense at the Limit 8. Making Sense with the Pharma Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

About the Author :
Lorna Collins is an artist, critic and arts educator. She completed her PhD in French Philosophy as a Foundation Scholar at Jesus College, University of Cambridge, UK. She is the co-editor of Deleuze and the Schizoanalysis of Visual Art, published by Bloomsbury. Her provocative practice as an artist (in paint, film, installation and performance) drives the motor of all her philosophical enquiries.

Review :
Lorna Collins' Making Sense: Art Practice and Transformative Therapeutics is a timely contribution to the theory and practice of psychotherapy. As conditions of work and life become increasingly precarious, various forms of mental distress and dis-ease such as depression are on the rise. At the same time, mental health services are perpetually under threat of budget cuts, and are typically under-funded in practically all nations in the world. By thinking through the transformative and potential of individual expression, Collins suggests that art, broadly conceived, can help us to make sense of the world, and thereby ameliorate or alleviate situations of suffering, without necessarily depending on (limited and costly) access to professional psychotherapy. Leon Tan, art historian, cultural theorist and psychotherapist