Beth Beatty

Project title: An arts-based inquiry into the experience of introducing Art Therapy into a mental health setting in rural NSW.

Beth is interested in the power of artmaking to express our unconscious, intuitive understanding of the world and to communicate emotion.

Born and bred in Brewarrina on the Barwon River in far western NSW her connection to the stillness of this wide-open country has remained an anchor point through her life.

After a career swimming upstream in education, she decided to gift herself with training in Art Therapy to be able to focus on therapeutic practice. The Master of Mental Health at UQ provides a comprehensive understanding of psychotherapy and extensive experience through placement to understand the reality of working within mental health systems. Her research explored her experience of introducing Art Therapy into this reality in a rural hospital setting.

Increasingly disillusioned with the over-reliance on the tool of verbal language as a method of effective communication, Beth’s artworks explore the adverse psychological impact of the necessary evils of jargon and acronym laden medical, bureaucratic, and institutional language and processes. Verbal language can create a barrier, can be used to intimidate, and exclude and cognitive articulation of ideas can be confused for deep understanding.

Can images and the art making process replace some of the chatter for people experiencing adverse mental health?

Can people working in roles to support others talk and write less, and listen more?

The heuristic nature of the research study led Beth to consider whether she, as an emerging art therapist, can reframe for herself the challenges of working within bureaucratic systems. The research challenged her to accept the necessity of systemic practices and use her energy more constructively to continue to strive to demonstrate what it means to create stillness and encourage listening in the busy world that is driving so many to compromised mental health.