Narrator: Art, in one form or another, has been around since the Stone Age.
And to this day, museums and galleries welcome hundreds of millions of visitors every year.
But why is this?
What compels us to produce, and experience artworks?
We all know art can draw strong reactions - both good and bad…
Janet Smyth: There are paintings that make me feel uncomfortable.
But I am quite intrigued as to why I might feel uncomfortable.
If that was the intention, or if there’s something in me that is responding in a particular way.
Narrator: There is a growing consensus among the public - and artists themselves
that art can have a strong effect on our mental health and wellbeing.
The therapeutic use of art materials has been there from the beginning of time.
Keith Hartley: Because it forces people to concentrate on something other than their worries.
Narrator: But - is this really the case?
What is the science behind art’s relationship with the mind?
Can art actually be good for you?
When looking at the relationship between art and the mind
it’s worth starting where art began.
Ingrid Bell: So we’re inherently creative beings.
Janet Smyth: Visual representation is kind of very embedded in our DNA.
Ingrid Bell: And have always used image making to express ourselves, and to give messages to
other people about ourselves – where we come from, who we are, that sort of thing.
Narrator: From the earliest civilisations, humans have always been drawn to the abstract
qualities of artwork.
From the exaggerated curves of Cycladic sculptures
to the stylised depictions of animals in ancient cave paintings
to the huge heads and sunken eyes of the Lewis chessmen.
Janet Smyth: There’s something very deep within us that immediately responds to that.
It’s been shown that the brain has evolved to understand art –
to both make art, and then also understand how to interpret visual representation.
Whereas, for example, the brain has not evolved to allow us to read – we have to learn to read.
Narrator: The Nobel prize winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel believes that it’s the abstract qualities
of art that the brain really responds to.
He suggests that abstraction challenges our brain through breaking apart the perspectives
of what it shows
forcing the brain to come up with what he calls ‘a new logic of bottom-up processing’.
Effectively, the idea is that the brain has to work in a completely different way when
looking at an artwork
a kind of challenge to the mind, to interpret images that it’s not used to reconstructing.
Art’s ability to trigger unusual processes in the brain has meant that it’s been used
as a kind of therapy
treating conditions from depression, to eating disorders, to PTSD.
Ingrid Bell: The term art therapy was coined after the second World War by Adrian Hill.
And he noticed the therapeutic benefits of art-making while he was in a sanatorium, recovering
from tuberculosis.
Narrator: The technique is based around the idea that the physical, and the creative making
of art, or marks, allows access to unconscious parts of the mind.
Ingrid Bell: Your unconscious processes – they are being fired as well, with the image.
So then you are looking at the image, and it’s giving you further information.
Narrator: Art therapy isn’t used to diagnose conditions, but rather to allow the therapist
and the client insight into past experiences by visualising elements of them on the page.
Lucy: The image that is made, we look at that together and what the meaning is for the client.
Narrator: Through this, therapists find that clients with conditions like PTSD are able
to express and recall memories that they are otherwise unable to talk about or access.
Ingrid Bell: It has actually helped people who have never managed to verbalise what their distress
is, but they can do it through the image.
Narrator: This idea of art as therapy can be seen throughout history, before the establishment
of formal art therapy.
Keith Hartley: I think quite a lot of artists suffered from depression, and have suffered
from schizophrenia, a whole range of things.
And I think art has given them a real way to free themselves.
Ingrid Bell: We’ve always been using image-making as a resource and a therapeutic tool -
a way to manage our inner lives.
Narrator: Individual artists like Louise Bourgeois, known for her twisting spiders and unflinching
self-portraits, have referenced the relationship between art and mental health - Bourgeois
saying
‘art is restoration… the idea is to repair the damages that are inflicted in life’.
Janet Smyth: The biggest thing for her is the importance of manifesting her own psychology.
Narrator: Those spiders were said to be a response to her family when growing up; an
arachnid depiction of her caring mother.
Her assistant, Jerry Gorovoy, described:
‘Like the young runaway Dorothy Gale from Kansas, Bourgeois has been on a journey to
alleviate a core experience of abandonment’.
Georgia O’Keeffe found art creation to be unique in how it could express internalised
feelings, saying:
“I found I could say things with colour and shape that I couldn't say any other way
- things that I had no words for.”
And of course, art has huge benefits for audiences and viewers too.
Neuroimaging studies have shown that experiencing art has a stabilising effect on our bodies
normalising heart rate, blood pressure, and even cortisol levels - which relate to stress
and increasing self-reflection and self-awareness.
Keith Hartley: It can calm you down, it can put things into a much broader perspective.
Janet Smyth: Once you understand yourself, then you can understand your place in the
world.
Kirsten Dunne: We have a couple of lovely letters that were sent to the Galleries about
the neon work we have at the front of Modern One, which says ‘everything is going to be okay’
And a couple of people who’ve been travelling past the Galleries, on the way to hospital
for serious treatments, and they’ve seen that message, and how it’s helped them
and I think that’s a very beautiful example of how art can uplift.
Narrator: Art’s associations with wellbeing, then, are well established.
It has always been a valuable way of allowing artists to externalise and analyse their thoughts.
And for audiences to gain new perspectives, and to experience art’s calming, creative
and positive benefits.
Through this, art is good for us, as a way to explore expressions and externalisations
of inner conflicts.
In the words of Yayoi Kusama,
‘I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieves
my illness is to keep creating art.
I followed the thread of art and somehow discovered a path that would allow me to live’.
There is still a lot of research to be done in order to deepen our understanding of art’s
relationship with the mind.
Ingrid Bell: I don’t know how much more there is to understand, in science, and in image
making
But it seems that there’s an enormous amount.
We’re just scratching the surface maybe, of understanding.
Narrator: For now, what is clear is that art can have benefits for us that are profound
and unknown.
Let us know how art has helped you in your life in the comments below, and visit our
channel for other videos in this series.