Collage

CRUSHED "Don’t Squeeze the Life Out of Me"

I was bursting with feelings the morning I came to Art Therapy and produced CRUSHED. I had just spent several days with my mother, and this relationship often provides much of my 'inspiration' in art therapy.

"What I felt so acutely when I worked on CRUSHED was the terrible sense of me as a precious, loving child - I chose the gold and red paper to symbolise this - being crushed daily by a mother who had nothing to give me. My childhood with her was a long story of neglect. I picked up the gold and red paper to shape the body of a child, head bowed, locked away down a long tunnel of blackness. For me this piece really captures my childhood feelings of hopelessness - a sense of aloneness from which there was no escape."

All text and pictures have been reproduced with the consent of the participants