“I’ve got a car with a back seat filled with art supplies, welcome to my life,” grins Evie Dunville outside of Tantallon’s Bike & Bean Cafe.
Based in St. Margarets Bay, the well-travelled art therapist keeps her paper, paints, clay and collage materials at the ready; there’s always another workshop or session coming up on her calendar.
She began with a combined background of a bachelor degree from Mount Saint Vincent University’s psychology program and a BFA in metalworking and jewellry design at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. Starting in 2012, Dunville began helping people work through personal obstacles using artistic expression during her studies for art therapy certification, which she earned in 2016, beginning her Evie Dunville Art Therapy practice, found online at eviearttherapy.ca.
It’s a growing field that’s at once accessible to a wide group of people of all ages and from all backgrounds, with little or no previous creative experience required. It offers Dunville a number of different options when it comes to establishing a rapport with clients and helping them find the best combination of expression and healing.
Art therapist Evie Dunville says her practice helps people reconnect with the world around them through creative expression. – Stephen Cooke
Expression beyond words
“Using art to express can go beyond words,” explains Dunville, after settling in at a corner table in the former train station turned cafe and bike shop. “Even for someone who maybe doesn’t have the language to form around it. Maybe their trauma happened pre-verbal, so maybe they don’t have language because there wasn’t any in their development at the time that it happened.
“Or maybe there are no the words to express it because they didn’t understand what was happening to them. Sometimes emotions are really hard to talk about, so when you’re actually able to put something down on paper, there’s a sense of removal. You’re not necessarily talking about yourself, you’re talking about the art, and that can be a little bit easier.”
Dunville’s next trip outside of Halifax will take her to Cumberland County, and the shore of the Minas Basin, where Parrsboro Creative is hosting her workshop on art therapy at the Fundy Geological Museum on Saturday, April 10 from 1 to 3 p.m.
A need for accessible care
Jocelyn Li is the executive director of the non-profit arts advocacy group, which has had an overwhelming interest in the introductory workshop, billed as a means of “fostering resiliency to create balance during times of stress and crisis.”
“Clearly, there’s a need for mental health care to be accessible,” says Li from the office of Parrsboro Creative, whose programs include the Parrsboro International Plein Air Festival painting competition.
“The demographic I’m seeing is quite diverse. We have families who are interested, and people who just arrived from Ontario and have been quarantining and are interested in participating because of isolation, not really knowing what to do with themselves.”
Li — whose own artistic background is in metallurgy and blacksmithing — sees the COVID-19 pandemic as just one of many factors increasing interest in the combination of art and therapy as a way to work through mental health issues, after a year that involved a number of trauma-inducing and anxiety-causing events.
“The focus is more on the process than it is on the product. That’s not to say that you wouldn’t get some amazing product coming out of it, but emotions are not always pretty.” – Evie Dunville, registered art therapist
As a means of treatment, art therapy is adaptable to the individual, and can be kept very simple so the act of creating and expressing is more meaningful and important than whatever the end creation turns out to be.
“The focus is more on the process than it is on the product,” says Dunville, who prefers to work with easy-to-use watercolours or pastels, or reshapable clay, with her clients. “That’s not to say that you wouldn’t get some amazing product coming out of it, but emotions are not always pretty.
“Sometimes, part of the process involves destroying it, in some way. Because that act can actually help with the emotional release. When you’re more focused on the process and less on the product, you’re not as worried about the materials that you’re putting into it.”
The adaptability of art therapy
Dunville’s practice ranges from what she calls “art-as-therapy” — which can be therapeutic and cathartic as participants learn to become more in touch with themselves — to something more focused and involved like art psychotherapy for individuals who have more complex diagnoses or are in the mental health system.
Besides having her training and a carful of art supplies, she also has to be mentally prepared for what a session can bring when she’s working with individuals in a practice that frequently takes her beyond Halifax to the Annapolis Valley, the South Shore. Or Parrsboro, where she’ll also meet with high school students and seniors who’ve been coping with isolation over the past year.
“They can get pretty heavy, when people are talking about what’s going on for them, once they get to a level of comfort where that’s what’s happening,” says Dunville. “So there have been sessions that have been really fun and light, because that’s what the client needs at that time, but sometimes they can be more emotional and need that kind of support.
“Even in group settings sometimes, there’s that emotional support of being witnessed and seen by a group of people who are in some way connected … you’re there for a similar reason so that ‘You’re not alone’ situation can come out of that as well.”
Raising the profile
Since she began her practice five years ago, Dunville has helped raise the profile of an approach to mental health treatment that she says is still relatively unknown on the East Coast and needs to be understood as a valuable tool in achieving breakthroughs and processing emotions in ways that are both rigourous and rewarding.
And rewarding for the therapist as well. When asked what she’s learned over the past several years of pursuing and practicing her chosen field, she is most emphatic.
“Everything,” says Dunville with a smile. “It keeps me humble. I am definitely trained, but I don’t think I’ll ever come to that point where I feel like an expert. I have an understanding of what things mean, but I’ve learned from years of working with clients never to assume where someone’s coming from.
“Just because one thing is going on, it doesn’t mean there aren’t a whole lot of other things happening for them. It’s definitely made me a more empathetic human being, and I feel like I’m constantly learning and growing.”
LONDON (AP) — With a few daubs of a paintbrush, the Brontë sisters have got their dots back.
More than eight decades after it was installed, a memorial to the three 19th-century sibling novelists in London’s Westminster Abbey was amended Thursday to restore the diaereses – the two dots over the e in their surname.
The dots — which indicate that the name is pronounced “brontay” rather than “bront” — were omitted when the stone tablet commemorating Charlotte, Emily and Anne was erected in the abbey’s Poets’ Corner in October 1939, just after the outbreak of World War II.
They were restored after Brontë historian Sharon Wright, editor of the Brontë Society Gazette, raised the issue with Dean of Westminster David Hoyle. The abbey asked its stonemason to tap in the dots and its conservator to paint them.
“There’s no paper record for anyone complaining about this or mentioning this, so I just wanted to put it right, really,” Wright said. “These three Yorkshire women deserve their place here, but they also deserve to have their name spelled correctly.”
It’s believed the writers’ Irish father Patrick changed the spelling of his surname from Brunty or Prunty when he went to university in England.
Raised on the wild Yorkshire moors, all three sisters died before they were 40, leaving enduring novels including Charlotte’s “Jane Eyre,” Emily’s “Wuthering Heights” and Anne’s “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.”
Rebecca Yorke, director of the Brontë Society, welcomed the restoration.
“As the Brontës and their work are loved and respected all over the world, it’s entirely appropriate that their name is spelled correctly on their memorial,” she said.
