Wendy Miller

Wendy Miller, Ph.D., ATR, is the co-founder of Create Therapy Institute, which offers clinical services in arts-based psychotherapy and trainings in expressive arts therapies and experiential approaches to learning. Miller is a founding member and first elected (past) Executive Co-Chair of the International Expressive Arts Therapy Association (IEATA). Her skills take her into the worlds of fine art, writing, psychology, expressive arts therapy, and mind-body medicine. She researches the relationships among the arts, creativity and health.

IMAGERY COMMUNICATES IN VARIOUS WAYS

Sensate Imagery: Expression giving the senses a way to be recognized; art-making presenting what is known to the senses but often unrecognized by other parts of the Self.

Kinesthetic Imagery: Expression moving an image through the whole system; art-making as a method of following an image as it creates associations and connections.
Imagery as Remnants of Experience: Remnants of expression are what art-making becomes -- what remains on the page, in a material, or as physical gesture as one tries to convey what is being sensed, yet not known of an experience.

Evocative Imagery: Expressions used, like words, cards, phrases, songs, actions, pictures, objects, textures, movements, to evoke art- making; used to foster an exploration of something specific for clarification, guidance, or re-direction.

Symbolic Imagery: Art-making used interpretively to convey symbolic recognition of a mythopoetic language.
Associative Imagery: Art -making as a way of listening and guiding through amplification; matching image with word, sound, movement, enactment, poetics.

Enactment Imagery: The creation of ritual, installation or action to honor and solidify understanding of what is most meaningful to the creator; a form of arrangement so that a pattern comes through.

Meditative Imagery: The healing quiet by which the theta brain wave state of reverie reveals and reaaranges information.

Process Imagery: The mirroring action of art-making as an assessment tool; memory as a psychic historian of the movement by which something evolves and grows, noticing feeling tone, use of space, privacy, physicality, composition, synthesis, etc.

Contained Imagery: The art processes as holding spaces for crystallization of experience.