by Kate Shand
On 19 June this year, my son would have turned 28 – 14 birthdays with him and 14 birthdays without. The story of my research is inextricably linked to the life and death of my son. In the early weeks after JP died, my best friend said something along the lines of, “you will take this shattering, incomprehensible loss and using your creativity, you will transform it”. I didn’t believe her. But I heard her. A few months later, I took what was left of JP’s clothes and bedding and I started stitching an eagle. An educational psychologist who assessed him when he was about ten remembered that when she had asked him what animal he most wanted to be, he answered, ‘An eagle’. The reason was simple: ‘It can fly, see things from a distance, and is completely free,’ he said. Sewing the eagle (Fig. 1) became my emotional alchemy. I cut and I pinned. I threaded the needle, I stitched, I knotted, I cut the thread. It was slow, it took time. It was repetitive. It had its own rhythm.
With my daughters, I went to Emoyeni Retreat Centre for some respite. At Emoyeni I met Hayley Berman who was taking time out to finish writing her PhD. We got chatting and I asked her what work she does, “I’m an art psychotherapist”, she said. As she described art therapy and her work I knew this is what I wanted. Her words made sense of what I’d intuitively been doing. I went home and started googling and reading.
A few years later, I found an art therapy workshop at Lefika La Phodiso, an art therapy NGO (founded by Hayley and at the time run by her). One of the symptoms of grief is a jumble of space and time – a sort of memory displacement. I arrived at the weekend-long event and Hayley was the facilitator – except I was unable to connect this Hayley with the person I’d met in 2011. She seemed familiar but I couldn’t place her. She reminded me of our meeting at Emoyeni. For one of our workshop activities, we’d been asked to bring an object from home. I brought JP’s silver eagle belt buckle. The buckle he’d loosely stitched to the front of his rucksack which he’d packed with running away items before he changed his mind and took his own life instead. Hayley invited us to create an image in response to our objects. I painted a wild and rough eagle, ascending from the flames, phoenix-like. Hayley looked at it – and said – ‘it’s your eagle now’.
After the weekend, I knew this is what I wanted to do. I wanted to do art therapy – it was still too early to imagine becoming an art therapist. I Googled and searched for other art therapy type workshops. There was nothing. But I kept searching and in 2015 I came across an advert for community art counselling training at Lefika with Hayley, and I started my community art counselling training in 2016.
At around that time, I started making dolls of various types and with all sorts of materials (Fig. 2). Sewing dolls flowed easily from sewing the eagle. It felt like these dolls had always been there, waiting to be made. The stitched dolls evolved (or ‘devolved’) from conventional rag dolls to very rudimentary paper and wool and string and glue type dolls – more of a suggestion of a doll. I discovered the joy and pleasure of clay and the dolls evolved further into mere hints of beings. I called them my warrior dolls. They emerged out of the fire of the kiln, transformed, strong and resilient.
At the end of the community art counselling training, Hayley said to me “just do your psychology 1, 2 and 3. Art therapy training will start at some stage and without undergrad psych you won’t be able to start”. I really didn’t want to do undergrad psych but started in 2017, just in case. During this year, I was invited by Lefika to develop a literacy programme for the children who had been identified as struggling with literacy and who were already attending the centre’s after-school sessions. It was fortuitous that I was reading about a literacy project involving storytelling and dollmaking – upon my husband’s insistence (Stein, 2003a, 2003b, 2008). His late wife, Dr Pippa Stein, was fascinated with dolls made by children living in an informal settlement. Drawing upon my training as a community art counsellor, I adapted Stein’s one-day project and conducted a 10-week pilot at Lefika, aiming to create a safe and creative space for learning. I designed the programme to take the children on a journey involving the creation of a character, the drawing or painting of that character (a 2-D image), creating a 3-D character (a doll), improvisations with the characters (puppet shows, plays etc), the writing of a story based on the character, and finally the creation of a self-bound book to contain the story. Each session built on and connected to the previous session. Over time, I introduced a changing theme for each term and different art modalities, because the same children returned each term. We named the programme ‘Uhambo’ which loosely translated from isiZulu means journey.
I wanted to create a safe space and a holding environment that recognises what Sashi Cullinan Cook calls ‘surfeit thinking’ – in other words where there is a focus on ‘existing skills and literacies in order to leverage learning’ (2018, p. 66). We are not the ones who know – it is the children who know. David Andrews says ‘These are not easy, polite spaces in that they actively engage the complexity and agency of the children’s lives rather than ignoring them’ (2024, p. 58).
The programme’s focus on multimodal pedagogies and therapeutic storytelling aimed to enhance literacy skills and emotional wellbeing for children struggling with reading and writing. By providing a safe environment for expression and creativity, the programme empowered children to create, imagine, and share their stories, strengthening their sense of agency and self-expression.
‘Uhambo’ was rich and rewarding – initially with one group in 2017, and then two groups (a teen and pre-teen group) throughout 2018. In 2019, a fellow art therapist, Kamal Naran facilitated the groups, and I continued them until Covid stopped them. The programme evolved from addressing educational deficits to a therapeutic initiative. My MA thesis explored the transformational moments in the ‘Uhambo’ literacy programme, highlighting the intersection of art therapy and multimodal pedagogies in community settings (Transformational moments at the intersection of art therapy and multimodal pedagogies: Case vignettes from the Uhambo literacy programme). My data included my extensive process notes and photographs I took during the lifecycle of the project. Ethical considerations were based on my secondary data and standard permissions and consent were received according to Lefika protocols and the programme ran ethically.
The journey from making my own dolls to providing a space where others could make their own was powerful. My dollmaking had sprung quite spontaneously as a response to significant and traumatic loss and bereavement; I explored and reflected on this process in my art therapy honours research (Beyond the transitional object: Art therapy and doll making). ‘Uhambo’ provided an opportunity to offer my own experience to others. It was another step towards becoming an art therapist – instead of making dolls for my healing, I facilitated a space where others could experience the benefits of dollmaking. As much as my Master’s research was about Uhambo and identifying the transformational moments for the children, connecting practice to theory and discussing the implications for art therapy in the South African context, it was also about my development and growth as an art therapist in training. I set about with a literacy programme and, over the months, it became about so much more. I watched in amazement what happens when a weekly group takes place at the same time for the same duration over months and then a year and then more than a year, with a core group of the same children. The group evolved, I evolved; I grew from anxious and controlling to open and receptive – being able to trust the moment, the children and myself in it.
My clinical placement site in 2023 was with the Johannesburg Parent and Child Counselling Centre (JPCCC) and I was placed with the Three2Six project – an educational project with migrant children. I had the opportunity to run the ‘Uhambo’ programme with two groups of children from a grade 4 class. One of my students at the Melville Mud Room (my pottery studio, Fig. 3) is Nereida Ripero-Muñiz, an academic at Wits University whose research is on migration. She has also done some creative arts interventions with migrants. We could see similarities in our work and last year we decided to start collaborating together. We co-facilitated another Uhambo group as a collaborative research project – The Meaning of Home – which got ethics clearance from Wits ethical committee (non-medical). We ran another two groups with the same children from the Three2Six project. We have recently published one outcome of the project, The meaning of Home: A toolkit for storytelling interventions with migrant children (Fig. 4) based on the workshop activities and including some reflections on the process. At the end of my Master’s year, I became a research associate at Wits and Nereida and I got a seed grant for a collaborative project with University College of London (UCL). We have been collaborating with colleagues from UCL who are also working with the arts and underserved communities, and we are working on another publication on arts-based methods that will be published at the beginning of next year. We also attended the IMPAC Symposium in Lusaka in March 2024, where we were able to present about our previous work and current work in progress. The ‘Uhambo’ project has come full circle and continues to grow.
When I reflect on my journey, my uhambo, I am struck by the threads that run between my experience of loss, my journey to become an art therapist, and the links to my practice and research. At the time, I couldn’t have known how apt the name was, as well as the opportunities that ‘Uhambo’ has given me – a programme with connection at its centre, each week building on the previous one, until a full story emerges. The journey continues.
KATE SHAND
Kate Shand is an art therapist (HPCSA registered) based in Melville Johannesburg. With her sister, ceramicist Nina Shand, she runs a pottery teaching studio, the Melville Mudroom. Kate is also a research associate at Wits where she’s working on a programme – The Meaning of Home – with migrant children. Dr Nereida Ripero-Muñiz and Kate are about to publish a toolkit entitled The Meaning of Home: A toolkit for storytelling interventions with migrant children. They are also working on a project with colleagues from University College London on arts-based research methods in under-served communities. She was recently appointed as a part-time lecturer with the University of Johannesburg Art Therapy programme. She is also co-supervising UJ Art Therapy Honours and MA research papers, and she is guest production editor of the next edition of the South African Journal of Arts Therapies. She continues her work with the Three2Six project and is running an art therapy group at the school.
REFERENCES
Andrews, D. 2024. ‘Radical Pedagogies’ in The Meaning of Home: A toolkit with storytelling interventions with migrant children, Shand, K., and Ripero-Muñiz, N. (Eds), Johannesburg, 58.
Cullinan Cook, S. 2018. ‘Surfeit Thinking’ in the Learning and Teaching of Design Theory in South Africa. In B. Gray, C. Cullinan, T. Toffa, & A. Soudien (Eds), Standing Items. Critical Pedagogies in South African Art, Design and Architecture, VIAD: Johannesburg. 66-81.
Stein P. 2003a. Rights, Representation and Resources: Multimodal Communication in South African Classrooms. PhD dissertation, University of London, London.
Stein, P. 2003b. The Olifantsvlei Fresh Stories Project: multimodality, creativity and fixing in the Semiotic Chain. In C. Jewitt, & G. Kress (Eds), Multimodal Literacy. New York: Peter Lang.
Stein, P. 2008. Multimodal pedagogies in diverse classrooms: Representation, rights and resources. Routledge.