School of Creative
Industries
Hamidah Otheman
Hamidah believes in a strengths-based, nurturing society that encourages individuals to embrace challenges and understand them as opportunities for creativity and growth. Such is the ardent belief she holds throughout her more than eight years of experience in providing therapeutic interventions to young people across various settings that range from a place of safety to acute and community mental healthcare.
To deepen her clinical skills, she pursued the MA Art Therapy programme as one of The Red Pencil (Singapore) scholars. It was there that she rediscovered her creative practice, which takes inspiration from the light-hearted to tragedy and everything in between that is imaginable.
Hamidah’s interests in mental health advocacy has led her to deliver talks, give media interviews, serve on panel discussions, present at an international conference and contribute to research. As an art therapist, she hopes to engage others by externalising and materialising their inner worlds.
Work
What's Your Play
Mixed media installation
Dimensions variable
2023
What's Your Play is the artist's personal exploration of the concept of play. Relying only on her body's disclosure as her guide, the installation is the artist's resolution of her dissonance with play. The way forward was fraught with resistance as she attempted to explicitly engage in a dialogue with her embodied experience. Articulating anything remotely intelligible with sound linearity required her to wring comprehension out of every fibre of her being. Supplied with the palpable intensity of unfathomable embodiment, each moving piece was a resounding echo of disquietness. Eventually realising that resistance was futile, she accepted it as her labour of play and charged ahead into play's victory of timelessness and repetitiveness.
Thesis abstract
Body in pace: Body mapping embodied experience of the internal supervisor in art therapy with youth of diverse needs from Singapore
This qualitative, practitioner-based thesis aimed to examine the art therapist trainee’s embodied experience of the internal supervisor and analyse its applications when providing art therapy to a non-verbal youth client from a diverse needs population. By using the arts-based research methodology of body mapping and response art, the trainee’s embodiment of the internal supervisor was externalised as a series of images in the form of body maps. Upon dialoguing with these embodied images, insights about the therapist competence and therapy quality emerged. Although critical to the therapeutic practice, such information can be inaccessible to practitioners due to the non-verbal characteristics of individuals from this population. This research found that the internal supervisor played a paramount role in containing and holding the trainee, which laid the foundation for the art therapist trainee to practise reflectively, reflexively and ethically.