Eco Art Therapy
Making art outdoors combines the powerful healing tool of visual art expression with restorative aspects of the natural world.
Being outdoors, and particularly moving outdoors in a beautiful or pleasant environment, increases health outcomes across domains – whoever you are, wherever you are, whatever you are struggling with.
We can acknowledge and increase our connection with nature, inside and outside ourselves. We use eco art therapy practices to bring understanding, healing and health to the ways we relate to the earth’s systems and to other beings, including humans. It is possible to increase resilience and sustainability, mitigate harm and reverse destruction.
August 2020
2022
When we are not able to get outside, we can incorporate natural elements into therapeutic practice.
For example, we can shift our attention from perseverating on stressful thoughts to focusing the color of the sky out the window, and consciously breathing that color into our bodies. We might run our hands through polished stones and feel the smooth, cool sensation on the skin of our fingertips.
Eco art therapy activities are diverse. Some possibilities include:
- Making art with found natural and discarded manufactured materials (a.k.a. trash).
- Using organic materials as tools and/or as surface – drawing with a twig into soft mud, for example.
- Using traditional art media outdoors, to create art that increases our awareness of our environment.
- Reducing the use of toxic and plastic art materials. Reusing materials. Recycling.
- Using elemental shifts – like blowing wind or flowing water – as part of the art piece.
It is urgent that humans become more creative and less destructive. I share the creative process as a tool for environmental and social justice, safety, health and peace.
As we connect more deeply to ourselves and our true nature, we are more able to connect to and be respectful of all other beings.
2018