DR AMANDA E WOODFORD
(she/her)
Creative Arts Therapist (AThR). Arts-based Researcher.
Practice Supervisor. Mixed Media Artist. Academic.
At Holding Space Therapeutic Arts Studio, I practice as an arts-based counselling therapist, researcher, practice supervisor, mixed media artist and academic. You will likely meet me or my work in one context. Yet, they are all threads of me as a therapeutic arts practitioner that I access when I feel it would benefit an inquiry and the process of knowledge gathering and understanding. My approach is from The MIECAT Institute (MIECAT) (Melbourne, Australia) and is called ‘the MIECAT form of inquiry’. I embed this form of inquiry into all parts of my practice.
MIECAT practitioners value experiencing, relationality, emergence and multimodality to ‘make sense’ and locate preferred ways of being. We are called ‘a companion’ and work collaboratively with our ‘inquirers’. Through my doctoral research, I also incorporate aesthetics into the process.
To me, aesthetics means ‘to feel,’ and this happens with touch upon artmaking materials and artistic forms, which I feel through my fingertips, hear, see, and feel in my heart. My relationship to touching and being touched in arts-making can be seen in the last section of my doctorate, uploaded on MIECAT’s research library—Vol 3(A), pages 463-472. My doctoral research inquired into living with post-operative ongoing pain and a form of mending through arts-based inquiries.
I enjoy ‘extended inquiries’ to meet and slowly absorb what matters across time. This slowness is offered to people, the other-than-human (arts materials and tools), and myself. I live with ongoing health conditions (including post-operative complex regional chronic pain) and a paced process I find helpful, especially when there is often not ‘an answer’ but a sense of being with ‘shifting sands’ and the notion of ‘becoming’ dependent on energy, environment, and ability. Care is important to me to enable and I ‘lean into’ what attracts and creates joy and motivation.
Arts-based therapy qualifications
• Professional Doctorate in Therapeutic Arts Practice (Prof Doc TAP)
• Master of Arts in Experiential and Creative Arts Therapy
(MA by Supervision ECAT)
• Graduate Diploma in Experiential and Creative Arts Therapy
(Grad Dip ECAT)
Professional association memberships
• The Australian, New Zealand and Asian Creative Arts Therapies Association (ANZACATA)
• The International Association for Creative Arts in Education and Therapy (IACAET)
• International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP)
• The New Zealand Pain Society (NZPS)
Availability: Unfortunately, my availability if limited. However, please don’t hesitate to contact me and I can let you know if my situation has changed or I can make suggestions on who to contact.
