A sense of coherence: Drawing for the mind

Abstract

As part of the award-winning Big Anxiety Festival in Australia, an exhibition of mixed-media drawings of plants and seeds was displayed at the University of Sydney, at the same time as two public drawing workshops in the Royal Botanic Garden Sydney. This paper describes and summarizes the various drawing techniques used in these workshops, and discusses the feedback from participants, who self-identified as having anxiety. Drawing using different types of approaches allowed workshop participants to mediate their tacit knowledge of the symptoms and solutions of living with anxiety, and to transition to a lived experience of proactively using drawings to improve their individual cognition, mindsets and mental health. Utilizing the platform afforded by the promotion of Mental Health Month in New South Wales, allowed the drawing exhibitions and workshops to be understood more broadly within an interdisciplinary context, which embedded their impact on other fields of research, including ecopsychology and biophilia, in a salutogenic model of practice. Specific to this approach, a ‘sense of coherence’ was deliberately embedded in both of the workshops’ sequential drawing exercises, which were observational and objective in intent. The exhibitions in 2017 and 2019 also consciously deployed a ‘sense of coherence’ in their design. Documentation drawings have recently been used as a tool to alleviate anxiety and promote wellness in medical staff working in a UK Emergency Department during the COVID-19 pandemic. This demonstrated the widespread potential applications for drawings to provide an antidote and a method of communication to proactively and positively assist mental health. Further research and exploration of the role that drawing plants and nature can play in the construction of learning in the context of individuals struggling with anxiety may offer routes to new knowledge and better understanding and potentially enhance connections between art and health researchers and institutions globally.