About nona
Using arts making as a reflective practice and as a way of making sense with others forms the basis for how I work. It is is through relational engagements with others and using arts processes where we explore their lived experiences together. , through my arts-based doctoral research, as an educator and supervisor of postgraduate therapeutic arts practitioners. This website showcases and offers access to my doctoral research into sharing and showing everyday grief, (see books below).
I live and work in Melbourne, Australia. I have a graduate diploma and masters in Creative Arts Therapy, a doctorate in Therapeutic Arts Practice, I am an educator, an arts therapist and I love to garden.
“Nona offers us deep, intimate and complicated understandings of how to do expressive arts work from a position of companionship. Our work in this field is so often described abstractly but so rarely performed with the level of grace and rawness that actually shows us what it means to ‘trust the process’ — such a lilting phrase with such unstated and enormous ramifications. ”
Research books
Expressing what is not yet available in words through manipulating art materials, offers a gentle way of being with ordinary everyday grief. This is not about making beautiful 'art', but rather, finding ways to be with loss that may feel incomprehensible, or impossible. Through trusting relational engagements with another we find safe enough places to be with the rawness of what feels so hard. You can learn more here by clicking on the image above.
Matchbox art
My daily reflective art practice, Matchbox Moments grew out of a further need for reflexivity while working therapeutically with others. This was a way of checking in with myself through focusing on what stayed with me from my day - something always would. I collaged a matchbox from found images and then inhabited the inside with little figurines. This project lasted for 380 days in 2011-12. I'm interested in how I might interact with these little art pieces now? (coming soon)
writing...
works
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