Inside the practice of a queer and posthumanist art therapist
Queer, as I use it, is not just who we love. It is a way of standing slightly askew from the rules that try to straighten us. Queer refuses either/or boxes, and welcomes the messy, living space where identity is always becoming. It is the courage to invent new ways to speak, live and thrive when the old scripts do not fit.
Posthumanist means more than human. It notices that our lives are braided with Country, ancestors, animals, materials, rivers and weather. It loosens the grip of human-centred, one size fits all models, and lets the studio become a meeting place for all these relations. This outlook helps us soften hard borders like human or nonhuman, man or woman, science or spirit, West or Indigenous.
Together, queer and posthumanist lenses serve a social justice project. They help me challenge dominant stories in therapy that can sideline non-white bodies, women, gender diverse and neuro-nontypical folks. I draw on a transformative research and practice stance that centres voices at the margins and examines how power shapes what gets called “truth”.
This is why I work in the “third space”. Think of it as a creative borderland where old binaries soften, and new possibilities appear. In this in between, we explore self and other, trauma and healing, Western and Indigenous, as fluid conversations rather than fixed walls. Artmaking is our passport there.
In practice, what does that look like?
We adopt a gentle “not knowing” posture. Instead of forcing your story to fit a manual, we let images, gestures and materials lead. Power becomes shared, curiosity does the guiding.
We welcome the more than human. Paper bark, thread, clay, wind through the window, a childhood talisman, the gum outside the room, may all take part in meaning making. These are not decoration, but relationship entangled with the more than human.
We hold diagnostic language lightly. The manuals have their uses, yet they cannot capture our hauntings, our myths, or the sacred that moves through grief and awe. Art lets those speak, and be soothed, without being reduced or flattened.
We honour culture and Country. My own practice is a decolonial gesture, returning to my mother’s lineages and the more than human world we belong to, and inviting you to root into yours.
If you imagine therapy as a house, queer and posthumanist art therapy opens extra rooms, and a garden gate. We do not force you to sit beneath one bright light at a single desk. We wander together, sometimes barefoot on the grass, sometimes at the kitchen table, sometimes out under the stars. In those places, images arrive with their own wisdom, and healing can take a shape that truly fits you.