This current issue of the CAET Journal distinguishes the unique power of art in a world of imponderable change, uncertainty, pandemic turbulence, and despair. It reifies the value of physical spaces, human connections, visceral qualities, and closeness to self and to others that had once been self-evident and taken for granted and are no longer so. It postulates upon the creative experience that resonates, expands, and guides its practitioners to maintain their vitality and find their strength, supports, and virtues. The articles presented in this issue overlook global changes in mental health, society, and their ties to art, suggesting that despite the different contexts and cultures in Eastern and Western lifestyles, the arts transcend words and bridge gaps within and between cultural circles. Read more

Author: Shaun McNiff

Introductory comments and reflections on the Donna Dodson and Jun Hu articles in the current issue of CAET dealing with scholars’ rocks and rock balancing art. The artistic approaches to the stone configurations are presented as accessible and transcultural forms of artistic expression that have a worldwide aesthetic appeal. Read More

Authors: Alexander Kopytin et al.

This article reviews the history of the Japanese art of Ikebana and the contemporary ecological art therapy practice involving botanical arranging and their correlation and contribution to the physical and mental well-being of human beings. Different perspectives are offered by a Brazilian Ikebana professor, with a neurological background, from the Ikenobo School, a Russian art therapist specializing in ecological art therapy, and a Chinese creative art therapist with a biomedical background. Ikebana and botanical arranging are considered forms of creative interaction with nature, providing multiple therapeutic effects and showing us how to realign with the laws of nature.  Read more

Authors: Akihito Suzuki

The interview focuses on James Miller’s thinking about the relation between Daoism and ecology. Miller believes that, to develop a foundation for ecological sustainability, we need to break down the separation between human beings and the world we live in. This can be done by Daoist techniques of bodily cultivation, based on the concept of the body as porous and interpenetrating with the environment. Practices such as these will lay the groundwork for an aesthetic foundation of ecology.  Read more

Authors: Deborah Green

Ecopoiesis invites us to become response-able from within our position as part of, rather than separate from, the natural world. What happens, however, when nature disrupts? When being ‘within’ and ‘part of’ becomes disturbing? And, in such situations, what may creative arts therapy offer? When earthquakes struck my home in Aotearoa/New Zealand (2010 onwards), I floundered within my own reactions to nature unchained. And yet, through poietic engagement with natures’ creative and destructive elements, my clients and I found ways to endure and even play within the chaos. I’ve subsequently used arts-based auto-ethnography to chart positionings and practices that may help other therapists to navigate living/working within similarly uncertain situations. In this arts-based exploration, I creatively revisit arts therapy that evolved in response to earthquake disaster and invite wonderings about similar ecopoietic responses to current contexts of COVID and climate change.  Read more

Author: Tony Yu Zhou, Fritjof Capra et al.

A dialogue concerning the arts and sciences was prompted among the panelists of an international webinar in November 2020, which featured Symmetry — a dance-opera film shot inside CERN, the largest experimental particle physics facility in the world. With the cathedral-like majesty of the Large Hadron Collider as his theater, a modern physicist searches for the smallest primordial particle and discovers a love without end. The panelists, which included the film’s writer and director, Ruben Van Leer, as well as other art directors, a dance choreographer, biomedical scientist, and art educator, shared their reflections from different perspectives on how the collision of arts and sciences can help us explore and expand a new dimension for a better understanding of human beings and nature, and the relationship between the two. The article ends with “A Systems View” of the living systems and art of Fritjof Capra, which reinforces the perspective of human-nature integration. Read more

Authors: Rachel Sweeney

In August 2015 a group of seven students and staff from Liverpool Hope University in the UK visited the SOS Children’s Village just outside Galle town in Southern Sri Lanka, to partake in a two week residential program ‘Global Hope’, teaching English to children between four and fifteen. Below is lecturer Dr Rachel Sweeney’s account of their experiences at the SOS Village, reflecting on a range of somatic educational tools as applied to the pedagogic focus of teaching English through movement and music, and focusing broadly on the education values of somatics as placed within an interdisciplinary embodied approach.   Read more

Authors: Tony Yu Zhou

Xiang-Dong Kong (born 1968, in Shanghai), Chinese pianist, one of the musicians featured in the 1979 documentary film, From Mao to Mozart: Isaac Stern in China. Kong was the Gold Medalist at the 1988 Gina Bachauer International Piano Competition. In 1992 he won the Sydney International Piano Competition. Dr. Tony Zhou, the executive editor of CAET, interviewed Kong for the Featured Artist column of the journal. The pianist shared his story and mission to bring music to the public to improve the well-being of humanity.   Read more