Journal May 2026 Release_Full Edition - Flipbook - Page 36
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perception as interconnected languages, alive and in motion. These aesthetic
conversations continuously shift as we negotiate our perception of reality and the
responsive reciprocity of sensory experience. The Icelandic–Danish artist Olafur
Eliasson provides another example of interactive media and the viewer’s
perception, using large-scale installations and elements such as light, rainbows,
ice, and weather to address our engagements with changing environments. I am
influenced by the art of the Australian Aboriginal Dreamtime, where time is
simultaneous, landscapes and their ancestors speak life’s storylines.
Narrative vitality
For many clients, enlivening their spirits means finding freedom from constrained
territories and speaking to the inner and outer worlds, the material and
immaterial, as one. Although quite different from my approach to art and
narrative, I recently encountered Georgi Y. Johnson’s (2017) writing on Nondual
Therapy and agree with her idea that dualism contracts the energy of time and
space (p. 2, pp. 77-78). This aligns with Deleuze’s immanent vitalism and Michael
White’s work on trauma, both of which emphasize the need for lines of flight and
the expansion of our energies in time and space beyond rigid representations and
diminished narratives. In articles one and two, I describe the imperative of
difference, the movement of thought, and the breaking of frames that free us
from restricted territories (Cotter, 2023; 2025). Johnson writes, “… there is a
sense of contraction or freeze… restraints in the flow of vitality through the body,
psyche, and mind …Where there was freedom, now there is contraction…” (2017,
p. 36). In Michael White’s discussion of narrative in the aftermath of trauma, he
writes, “This is a recounting of life that lacks vitality and animation - it is flat,
dead” (2004, p. 70). He (2004) continues, “We can think of identity as a territory
of life … there is a very significant shrinking of this territory of identity … ” (p. 46).
Honoring a client’s responses, however small, we reinvigorate their sense of self
and connection through “… aesthetics of living and, at times, … specific spiritual
notions” (pp. 46-47). We can employ double listening, witnessing, and questions
to broaden access to alternative territories. White describes this expansion of the
“territories of life” as “islands upon which safety and sustenance can be found,
and then archipelagos, and eventually continents of security that open other
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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