Body mapping is an arts-based research tool, which, due to its focus on embodied experience, lends itself to exploration of bodily and psychological feelings and experience. Used extensively in a program at the Black Dog Institute, led by Prof Katherine Boydell, body mapping involves tracing around a person’s body to create a life-sized outline, which is then filled in during a creative and reflective process, producing an image that reveals aspects of embodied experience.

Inspired by the artworks in the Gallery’s 19th century and contemporary galleries, you will be guided to create your own, life-sized body map, which visualises and explores experiences of anxiety and the ways this is managed. You will be led through a series of meditative and creative activities based on the tenets of mindfulness and Positive Psychology during the body mapping process in order to help articulate and visually express experiences of, and methods for coping with, everyday and out of the ordinary anxiety.

The Body Mapping workshops follow the Performance Anxiety event in the Domain Theatre on 4 October.

Access: This event involves floor based work – lying down and kneeling.

Presented with Art Gallery of NSW.

Katherine Boydell

Dr. Boydell is a Professor of Mental Health at The Black Dog Institute, UNSW. Her research focuses on understanding complex pathways to care for young people experiencing first episode psychosis, the use of new technologies in child and youth mental health, and the ‘science’ of knowledge translation. To that end, she advances qualitative inquiry in arts-based health research. She has published more than 200 journal articles and her text Hearing Voices: Qualitative Inquiry in Early Psychosis represents the first compendium to focus on qualitative inquiry in this field. Recent projects focus on the use of body mapping to share the experiences of youth with psychosis, the general public’s experience of anxiety, and the experience of anxiety and depression in pre-teens.