Journal May 2026 Release_Full Edition - Flipbook - Page 33
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offers a spatial strategy in which the viewer becomes both the viewer and the
viewed, blurring the distinctions between inside and outside. As a narrative
therapist, I consider the benefits of clients focusing on their individual, subjective
experiences while communicating with the environment as part of the whole.
Artists provide many examples of the interplay between the inner and the outer,
as in the sculptures of Anish Kapoor and Ruth Asawa. Kapoor’s work incorporates
the viewer into its surface reflections. Asawa creates wire sculptures, stating,
“What I was excited by was I could make a shape that was inside and outside at
the same time” (as cited in Higa, 2014). A related idea appears in literature, where
the reader is seen as part of the text's meaning. Similarly, narrative therapists are
decentered collaborators who challenge the notion of the therapist as an
external, objective observer. Whether we are an audience for Kusama’s artwork,
a reader, or a therapist, we find ourselves part of the work. Kusama (n.d.) reminds
me of Thich Nhat Hanh’s idea of ‘interbeing.’ He writes, “If you are a poet, you
will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper” because the
paper cannot exist without the cloud and the rain (1992, p. 95). Kusama’s Infinity
Mirrored Room presents a counter-narrative of interconnection, with multiple
subjectivities, locations, and moments in time.
While the traditional focus on a protagonist as the driver of a story’s action may
impose a conventional structure, our aesthetic conversations can deconstruct this
ordering. Kenneth Gergen (2021) writes about relational ways of being that
support this shift in perspective. He critiques the “presumption of separation”
underlying our mental states and social systems, including “... families, schools,
organizations, and nations” being seen as individual, “independent units” (pp. 24). Similar to Craig Chalquist’s inquiry, Gergen asks, “What if we reverse the order
of significance, and begin with relational process…?” (2021, p. 10). Our
representational systems are embedded in the inextricable links between
knowledge and power. Aesthetics can reveal implicit assumptions within story
geography and “the organization of persons in space” (White & Epston, 1990, p.
30). In narrative therapy, we focus on clients’ subjective experiences and firstperson accounts. In contrast, art invites relational and cultural perspectives that
go beyond the boundaries of internal and external, subject and object, and move
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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