What Does It Mean To Be A Practitioner In The Arts: Graduate Edition

Creating a Place for Everyone

PowHERhouse champions the changework of relational leaders and social impactors. Together, as allies, PowHERhouse and WHEAT are walking the path of truth and reconciliation for all our relations. This current transition and collaboration hopes to reflect and bring forth healing, empathy, inclusivity, listening-focused circles, and relational, open, arts-enhanced communication – the founding values of WHEAT that remain solid and unwavering.

Check out our Profile with PowHERhouse

Mitchell “Mitchi” Saunders

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“Helping people to express themselves for a sense of hope.” Mitchell “Mitchi” Saunders: WHEAT institute graduate expressive arts diploma.

Expressive Art is a process that helps people to heal without using words. Words are sometimes hard to find. Small changes can happen through painting, dancing or using any of the multiple art forms. It becomes a gateway to self-identity and self-realization. It is this gift that I will pass on to others as a two-spirited Expressive Arts teacher and healer.

Mitchell

Meet Mitchell Saunders and Learn More About His Journey with WHEAT

Bevan Klassen

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“We start by playing because that’s where the energy is.” Bevan Klassen: therapist and owner of Deep Focus Art therapy, WHEAT expressive arts graduate.

Art Therapy is a combination of psychotherapy (talk therapy) and the creative process (art). It is a potent mix. It takes us back to when we played as children and time flowed and how spacious that felt. In high school and college, I was involved in drama; it was an expressive, wonderful, and spacious place. Accessing this place in our imagination provides us with other dimensions in which to be curious and express ourselves in ways other than words, and including words. It provides an entry point to externalize our stories. The story we tell is the story that we live, so to know that inner story is so powerful. When we hold that narrative in a video, photograph, or a clay object, it is outside of ourselves. And that is the beginning of a conversation.

Bevan

Meet Bevan Klassen and Learn More About His Work as a Storyteller

Miriam Duff

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“An embodied response, a movement that comes from a place that is not in the head, it’s in the heart.” Miriam Duff. M.Ed., Psychosocial Oncology Clinician (Counselling and group facilitation) at CancerCare Manitoba and WHEAT Graduate.

Expressive Arts is rooted in engaging the imagination to create art in a multimodal way, and experiencing the aesthetic response that arises in the process. By aesthetic response, I am referring to a visceral response/way of knowing — a place not in the head but in the heart. It is soul work.

Miriam

Meet Miriam Duff and Learn More About Her Experience in Expressive Arts Therapy