“The Creative Journal is not a closed method, but an open-ended creative approach that continues to grow with different applications. Your journal is a place to let yourself out, channel your private inner world into tangible form. The page becomes a mirror for seeing yourself more clearly. it is also a medium for conversing freely with yourself. Starting with self-communication in private, you can then develop your ability to communicate with others. Being clear with yourself opens the way for being more clear with others about how you feel and think, enriching your relationships and social interactions.”
Capacchione, p.6
There is a thing that has always been there, a need to write it all down. The need to doodle out an inexpressible feeling. To spend time with myself in solitude and work out an idea in a hundred ways. The therapy of art journaling as a means of processing trauma and responded from the most instinctive self as written by Jenna Desmond in “Re-Assemblage of Self: Visual Art Journaling for Clients with Cumulative Trauma” (did you know you can just read therapy journals online, why would anyone have a therapist?!) is a process of “assigning pain a meaning” (Desmond, p.7) to externalize thoughts and feelings on paper, connect with authentic self, experience a range of feelings. The journal offered “therapeutic distance”(Desmond, p.6) safely processing emotions.
The commitment to know myself and work through the manifestation of that knowing in a myriad of mediums (alliteration, nice) is forever a bigger version of something I first put in a visual journal. Dishes reflective of sketches made at the top of Vermont mountains, fan-zines made of the drawing of my favorite beer spot in Corner Brook, a bronze cast head tube badge, a blanket, a jacket, the words I lace in the background of everything are omnipresent reminders of a loving dedication to my art journals recording my life and whispering back to me who I am. This practice of recording myself like an anthropologist on a mission becomes a driving force in making, and a beating tempo guiding the procession. Not to be dramatic.
Using these book making skills I combine them with other materials to make moving paper sculptures (mixtapes, hand fans, a deck of fancy cards -ahemmm-).
It is this book making- and the skill set it requires- that makes a gift for loved ones, and contains my doodles but also can make you a complicated love letter and cool you down on a hot day.
(making a book is a relationship to god)
Kellyann Marie Irene 