“We begin with drawing a circle the size of a plate. I invite them to look within and see what emotions are there that they may not have noticed before - what is wanting their attention. That emotion might have a colour or a texture. And I invite them to open their eyes, pick the colour that comes to them, and start applying it inside the circle. Brushstroke by brushstroke, listening to what needs to happen.”
For Hailey, growing into her calling was, like the lines drawn in art therapy, not a streamlined route with a fixed destination.
As a child, art had always been a comfort space where she could be herself - and yet her formal education, from an arts high school to a master’s degree, was at times nurturing, at times indifferent, and at worst hostile to Hailey’s perception of art. She once discovered a book in her parents’ library that introduced the concept of process painting: painting done from intuition and spontaneity. Moved, she showed it to one of her art teachers, who quickly dismissed it. “This is not art!” he sniffed. This was perhaps her earliest sense of the reckoning our systems bring to bear on creativity.
While doing her bachelor’s of Fine Art, Hailey encountered a very rigid approach to art by some of her male art teachers. They wanted her to take “anything figurative or traditionally beautiful” out of her art, and aim for pure abstraction. She had done a series on women artists who had been overlooked, and had given each woman a circular halo. “Take out the women and just leave circles!” her professor said as he took a deep drag on his cigarette and flicked it onto her paint pallette. After university, Hailey stopped making art for a few years. She embarked on the kind of education that has no formal structure, no course selection or grades. She got lost on her own in the world: lost in the adventurous sense of travelling while in one’s twenties, but also, over the course of it, lost in other ways. In her own words, she speaks of losing sight of her inner compass somewhere along the peaks and valleys - both literal and metaphorical - of those years, and of rediscovering it when she began creating art again. She also speaks of having to unlearn what we’ve been told about art, and about creativity, in order to discover what they really mean, and how we might use them in radical ways. Hailey emerged with her own radical realization: to change the world, we need women’s creativity.
“When you put something on a piece of paper in front of you, it puts the power back in your hands, literally. You get to tell the story of what happened, and change it, and shape it.”
Today, Hailey’s practice holds a gentle power. She reminds us of the transformative potential to be found in soft spaces, quiet atmospheres, and medleys composed of liquid colours. Here there are avenues for self-expression, self-knowledge, growth, and healing that make the world a safer place for art, and thus a safer place for women. “For centuries we’ve been pathologized for being sensitive and intuitive. I am here to help women rediscover and celebrate those qualities, because those are our strengths.” To learn more about Art Theraphy in Action, visit their website.