Journal May 2026 Release_Full Edition - Flipbook - Page 27
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In both art and storytelling, we animate the media of creation, and these vital acts
reveal hidden values in how we position and organize knowledge. Michael White
and David Epston emphasize the need to “…identify the context of ideas in which
our practices are situated and explore the history of these ideas” (1990, p. 29).
Narrative therapists encourage an ethics of collaboration that investigates what is
central to therapeutic conversations. We question our complicity in reinforcing
outdated systems rather than conceiving novel ecologies for clients’ lives.
Earlier in the series, I discussed the potential that emerges when “we look to
practices and the genesis of performance, rather than representation, as our basis
for knowledge” (Cotter, 2025, p. 23). Art interrupts our “habits of meaning
making” to expose preconceptions about logic, ordering, and coherence that
affect how we see our place in the world (Cotter, 2023, p. 39).
As William Blake (1906) wrote, “If the doors of perception were cleansed,
everything would appear to man as it is, infinite" (p. 26). The artistic act reveals
the contingency that shapes perception and experience. In articles one and two of
“Breaking the Frame,” I discuss how art can expand the narrative metaphor and
resist the seduction of resemblance, encouraging handmade meanings,
abstraction, fluidity, and contextual migration. The second article in the series
examines the movement of thought and assemblages of ideas that arise through
aesthetic and interdisciplinary approaches, and I learn from the dynamic ways
Andy Goldsworthy’s artwork interacts with the environment. Similar to
Goldsworthy’s ice sculptures, leaves, and river eddies, the subject is transformed
through relational processes. We are in flux, and experience, like art, is a
conversation between the world and ourselves, a call-and-response and a
reminder of intertextual exchange, layering events with ongoing reauthoring
throughout all of life.
A narrative nondual therapy
In this final article of the series, art helps me examine various forms of dualism,
such as mind-body, self-world, subject-object, and spirit-matter, that shape story
construction. I turn to aesthetics to imagine nondual options for narrative
Breaking the Frame: Aesthetic Encounters with Narrative Practice – Part Three
Journal of Contemporary Narrative Therapy, May 2026 Release, p. 25-51.
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