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Nala Turner | Episode 708
Nala Turner is a Brooklyn-based ceramics artist and creative art therapist, working primarily with themes related to race-issues, cultural identity, femininity, social stereotype, and popular culture perspectives. Nala has shown her work in various gallery, workshop, and press settings. Through clay-work, Nala aims to inspire her audience to recognize such culturally restricting barriers and transubstantiate the cultural representation of Black people.
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How does pain help to become fertilizer for growth after the fact?
I think in the healing process knowing that you can reach and experience pain leaves room for repair so as someone ages or as time goes by it leaves that time and space on their journey to take that pain and mold it into something else. You know pain hurts and you feel it, but that also means you can learn from the pain and that that experience didn’t just exist by itself in silence, you had it for a reason. None of our experiences happen in a vacuum and so the pain then becomes part of the process of the healing.
Why is it that art, making with clay, why is it that it helps people to deal with the current trauma they are in?
Yes, absolutely. We talked about it a little bit earlier, but especially with clay, everything with art is involved with the body. Most of the art is done with your hands, unless there is anyone doing foot painting or things like that. Which is definitely possible, but it is a hand’s on experience and in therapy we call this body integration. So for example with someone who perhaps is dealing with cancer treatment or maybe they are in remission, they are able to re-examine their body, the trauma that they actually have to go through dealing with cancer, the trauma of dealing with treatment and they are able to integrate that experience starting from the body. So it’s a bottom up approach. Instead of starting with the mind and all the psyche stuff you actually start with the body-the part that was harmed the most. So with treatment it becomes important for the person to sort of re-author those traumatic experiences starting with their body. They begin to regulate their body, regulate their breathing, regulate their emotions, and have an experience that you have particularly when creating art that is very similar to the process that you have when you are healing or when you are going through physical therapy. And so that is why I personally have an large interest in the idea of the bottom up approach. That idea of examining processes that have to do with, so just human perception but our perception based off of how our body is reacting to things. So when we go through something really traumatic the person is then able to integrate all those trauma experiences and recreate a new narrative almost, by taking the little pieces and creating a new narrative and making it not trauma but instead the healing.
Does it have to be a major trauma for art therapy to be helpful?
Oh, absolutely not. Art therapy can be helpful for what might be thought of as the most trivial trauma. I am one who believes that everyone experiences trauma sometime in their life no matter how large or how small someone might think it is, art therapy can be majorly beneficial for it.
What about age, is there an age when art therapy stops working or an age when it works best?
No, I don’t believe there is. There are therapists in many different age groups. I personally have worked with as young as 18 months and as old as 87 or 88 and I have seen it being useful in different spaces. Of course it is navigated and it is approached differently. With someone who can’t speak or someone who can’t hold a pencil it is going to be a bit of different process but that doesn’t mean the intervention itself isn’t being useful. You are just going to navigate it differently for that person.
Why is that creativity is a stress relief?
I think for a lot of people creativity and art in particular is tied to that cathartic feeling and I think catharsis is huge for relaxation. So a lot of people go into doing something, something as simple as drawing zen-tangles or circles or something and that process can be quote, unquote, fun. And when we have fun in something that engages parts of our body and brain that allows the relaxation and allows the catharsis.
You are an art therapist. What does an art therapist do to unwind?
Art. (laughter) Ironically enough, yes, I do lots of art. But I also enjoy music, heavily. Music is a huge part of my life. I am also a musician. I guess that is another art form in itself, but even just sitting and listening to music is huge for me. I like to just sit and listen to music.
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