School of Creative
Industries
Urso Giuseppina
Pina is an experienced educator who has worked internationally for over 25 years with children and adolescents in various multicultural formal and informal educational settings. Her credentials include a BA in Social Sciences and Education, a postgraduate diploma in Special Education, and a postgraduate certificate in Creative Arts Therapies. Throughout her learning journey in art psychotherapy training, she maintained both national and international memberships, including with the Australian, New Zealand and Asian Creative Arts Therapies Association and the European Federation of Art Therapy.
As a trailing spouse and a mother of three young adults, her art practice helped her to process acculturation, adaptation, and build resilience, which inspired her to pursue the MA Art Therapy programme to consolidate her training as a mental health professional. Pina has prior experience working with the mental health population in volunteer projects in children’s hospitals and community settings in the Asia-Pacific region. As part of art psychotherapy training, she broadened her clinical experience, providing therapeutic services to children and adolescents diagnosed with various neurodevelopmental disorders within a leading national institution for persons with disabilities and a local mainstream primary school.
Pina explored how the psychology of her environment influences her social, cultural, creative and professional experiences. She is an experiential artist who embraces processes that emphasise the sensorial kinaesthetic process of making art and explore the concepts of change and transience.
Work
Self-transcendence
Mixed media hanging sculpture
Dimensions variable
2023
The artist believes that the body is both the subject and object of intentionality – it is experienced as an object in the world yet manifests itself through experience. This constant traction is what makes the human experience so meaningful and worth exploring.
Aiming to provoke, tease and encourage viewers and their human interaction, the artist's work explores the relationship between the performer, artwork and observer as an interactive aesthetic and intersubjective phenomena. Her artworks take on a fully experiential perspective which represents an attempt and journey of searching for a psychological safe space. The spiral symbolises the holistic development of the artist's life through the rotating seasons of the years, winding its way towards her search for meaning and encounters external to herself, ultimately experiencing self-transcendence.
Thesis abstract
Time-limited art psychotherapy intervention in the primary school: How it affects change
This multiple-vignette qualitative reflexive practitioner-based approach with art-based inquiry explores the provision of time-limited art psychotherapy to children in a single-gender primary school. The literature review outlines key theoretical writings on time-limited art psychotherapy and therapeutic change factors in school-based art psychotherapy interventions. Although this enquiry is situated in the context-specific school setting, the author wants to clarify how the therapeutic changes in the child’s behaviour, attitudes, and feelings have been affected by the specific agents of change induced by the interactive aesthetic and intersubjective triangular alliance in art therapy. The study intends to integrate aspects of relevant psychodynamic theories and models in use. They include mechanisms of change and developmental and attachment theories while adding to the pool of qualitative research in school-based art psychotherapy. Implications and findings suggest that art therapy can provide resources and means to children and information about changes occurring regardless of time limitations and environmental factors.