Healing through colour & clay

Through her work with prisoners, Kruger has found herself inspired to undertake a PhD through University of South Africa (UNISA), in which she aims to investigate art in an “advocative way”. This entails exploring how it can serve as a “middle ground” or intermediary space between prisoners and their estranged families, she says. 

“I’ve always felt that [meeting again] is a very emotionally-loaded situation for [the family members] and also for the prisoner himself,” says Kruger. 

Kruger dreams of a space where art is exhibited “without physical presence or words”, for estranged families of the prisoners to “experience what the prisoner has [created]”.

This ability to transcend boundaries and express emotions in a non-verbal capacity is what makes art therapy unique as a formalised medical practice. This is according to Kamal Naran, part-time lecturer at the University of Johannesburg (UJ), who oversees an art therapy programme where he works with both honours and master’s students.

Art and art therapy “offers alternate non-verbal pathways into expression of experience that may be too difficult to process with talking”, says Naran. “It can bring form to the formless.”

“Art in itself is a universal language,” he says. “If we think about [South Africa] and what a multicultural melting pot it is, art therapy is the pot that can hold all of it.”

Leigh-Anne Alexander, a qualified art psychotherapist, describes art therapy as an active artmaking and creative process which is underpinned by psychological theory. It is the added ability to use non-verbal ways to communicate, therefore, making art therapy “so accessible”. She explains that it is because everyone can create an image, but not everyone can always articulate how they experience depression or even recognise and describe its symptoms.

As a formal qualification, however, art therapy is still in its infant stages in South Africa, according to Alexander and Naran. 

Despite being registered as a single-medium practice under the Health Professions Council of South Africa (HPCSA) in 1997, it was only in 2020 that an honours degree in arts therapy was launched at UJ, says Alexander.  

Art has the ability to convey information and emotions that words often cannot. 

While working at Lentegeur Hospital, a psychiatric and mental health hospital in Cape Town, Alexander encountered a patient with schizophrenia. He was a 17-year-old boy who, through substance abuse, had developed psychosis and gone mute. 

Despite weeks of trying, psychiatrists and psychologists could not get through to him, says Alexander. And then he became one of her patients. 

By having him perform artistic activities, such as drawing his family and creating collages of all of his favourite things, Alexander was able to acquire information that verbal therapists could not. In such cases, art therapy becomes “super helpful”, says Alexander.

“It can transcend things like language and can provide the opportunity for new understanding,” says Naran.

Just as Kruger used art to uplift the incarcerated by helping them develop skills that could generate income, a pottery studio outside central Stellenbosch has used clay to empower women working on farms. 

The Crafter’s Corner, established in 2017 under the umbrella of the Living Arts Foundation, offers free ceramics classes for women who work on the local farms surrounding Stellenbosch. These classes and materials are subsidised by income generated through classes offered to private students.

This is according to Heidi Hirsch, current manager of the studio and biologist who joined the studio in search of a creative outlet after growing tired of “just pure science”. 

Hirsch had never done pottery before but became “completely hooked” by clay.

“Clay changes you,” says Hirsch. “It’s very therapeutic and meditative.”

At the time of writing, four women attend the classes, which are held twice a week. These women are Tafadzwa Mhondiwa, Neliswa Xamle, Zanele Hlabisa and Nicolene Claasen. 

Starting out by simply making buttons, they have honed their craft over time and can now make anything ranging from mugs and bowls to jellyfish vases and coral-like candlesticks. They then sell their creations to various stakeholders, such as Spier Wine Farm, which is currently their biggest client, according to Hirsch.

Their newest member, Zanele Hlabisa, who works on Spier Wine Farm, was merely an onlooker, watching Mhondiwa and former member Thembi Hlazo go to the studio in the evenings to craft. In 2023, Mhondiwa encouraged Hlabisa to join, she says. 

“I didn’t know anything about clay,” says Hlabisa, explaining how, at first, she would occasionally miss sessions because she was unfamiliar with clay. Now, she feels far more confident in her craft and proud when something she makes translates into something tangible: Money.

For Mhondiwa, the most experienced of them all, making clay is therapeutic because it allows her to forget her problems and just focus on what she is doing.

This is especially true for her following the loss of the women’s fellow member and friend, Hlazo, to a car accident in 2021, Hirsch says. 

“It was a big cut,” says Hirsch. “She was this amazing personality [and] always happy.” Coming to the studio after her death, Mhondiwa says that she, too, felt “emptiness and loneliness”.

However, the crafters feel as if clay, somehow, brought them all closer together during this time. “As I said a few times, I think it’s very therapeutic. I think clay is a teacher and it teaches you so many things,” says Hirsch.

While Alexander and Naran recognise the benefits of art-based activities as forms of expression and healing, they agree that art psychotherapy and the clinical benefits gained from artmaking are different.

Art therapy is an established form of psychotherapy delivered by an art therapist who has studied the subject at a master’s level, says Naran.

“When we use art-based activities in our practice and are not trained as art therapists, you are not doing art therapy, you are using it as a tool,” he says. “And there is value in this as well… However, the depth in which one would be able to explore what more might be sitting in the art is not engaged with and that […] could be very distressing.”

Alexander and Naran wish for a space where formal art therapy and art-based initiatives can co-exist. 

This is so that one can provide an “ethical and supportive space” should the art process “evoke something that requires deeper understanding and therapeutic holding”, says Naran.

However, the challenge lies in the lack of advocacy for art therapy to be recognised as a profession that is capable and effective in the mental health modality. 

“It needs to be woven into existing healthcare settings,” says Naran. “You should be able to walk into hospitals, clinics, etc. and find an art therapist as part of the services accessible to the people.”