What is Bodyscapes?

The Bodyscapes workshop is a groundbreaking interactive process that engages people in creating poetry and pastel drawings to give voice to personal, community and intergenerational trauma and/or illness so everyone and the earth can heal.

The powerful experience begins when you make your crucial first step to break the isolation that is the lived reality of so many people living with trauma and illness, and join Diane Sciarretta, creator of Bodyscapes, in a safe and loving space for sharing in this guided, autobiographical inquiry.

Our artistic healing journey begins with sharing about ourselves. Art-making is an intimate experience. Our opening and vulnerability leads us gently into the state of the artist, as we venture to overcome our fears of making art (“I don’t know how to draw!”) and of unearthing the emotional landscape of joy and pain, rage, struggles and successes of coping with trauma and/or serious illness. 

When we create our haiku/rap/poems, we choose the words that most faithfully portray our truth about where we are that day, in our lived experience of illness, freed from the expectation that we always show a positive face to others, as if it is our job to alleviate other people’s discomfort with our reality. We gain fresh insights into our experience as we discover and employ the power of the words that are most truly ours, and perhaps even reopen pathways to memories obstructed by trauma and cultural inhibitions to talking about certain subject matter.

Now we focus inward to the parts of the body that carry our physical and emotional pain. Under the skin, where our organs and bodily systems hold our pain of shame, stigma, isolation, untold stories wait to be given shape and voice. What color are your pain and anger, your hope and joy and triumphs? What line forms can we use to evoke a specific meaning or mood?

Rubbing our pastels onto our images of our own bodies or organs is a form of self-care that stimulates our healing response by focusing our energies directly on the source of our illness or trauma.

Throughout this process of revealing our innermost stories, we transform ourselves from victims to interpreters of illness. We bring greater understanding of the lessons learned from living with illness to ourselves, friends and communities. One Bodyscapes artist put it this way: “Something so simple like writing a poem and using colors became gazing into my soul!”

The reach of the workshop can be extended by the production of a catalogue with all the artwork and poems, and/or by an art exhibit with an opening ceremony featuring the performative action of reading our poems for family, friends and community

Bodyscapes can be also engaged via a one-to-one private session.