School of Creative
Industries
Janel Ang
Janel Ang is a versatile arts practitioner and community artist, striving to experiment with multimedia to diversify her practice to increase the accessibility of the arts. In order to hone her discipline, she pursued an MA Art Therapy degree at LASALLE College of the Arts as a Red Pencil Scholarship recipient. She was a graduate of both pioneering cohorts of Yale-NUS College (BA Hons, Arts and Humanities) and School of the Arts (Visual arts major), Singapore. Her community projects and artworks explore challenging issues through animation, filmmaking and other media, pondering care, grief and ways to live well. The communities that she has engaged through the arts range from children with special needs and disabilities to seniors living with dementia. By sparking candid conversation through art and community programmes, she works with relational empathy and insight, thereby spurring positive advocacy amongst her contemporaries.
Work
The Steps We Take
Video animation
4 mins
2021
The Steps We Take is a diaristic frame by frame animation comprising more than 2,000 individual drawings made daily in a reflective practice during the art therapy programme. Inspired by and expanding on concepts of longitudinal response art methods for self-care such as the One-Canvas Process Painting of Miller (2012), making this animation was a therapeutic practice to expand my capacity for long-term caregiving. With this novel self-sufficient care approach, I proffer a creative method for those in professions of care to sustain themselves amidst the prevalence of burnout and compassion fatigue.
Thesis abstract
Searching for love: the therapeutic potential of multimedia online art therapy with a 21-year old male artiste with Down syndrome
Amid the backdrop of the COVID-19 pandemic, how can intimacy be forged across digital and virtual spaces? In this thesis, I strive to answer the research question: What is the therapeutic potential of multimedia online art therapy for a 21-yea- old male artiste with Down syndrome in supporting his search for love? Through a practitioner-based, single-case study methodology bolstered by reflexive qualitative approaches, I examine how art therapy may be conducted online and how multimedia can be used creatively to tackle challenges in social competency, media literacy and behavioural appropriateness, as well as address the sexual needs and offer sexual education to persons with disabilities. This preliminary study aims to provide a vignette of novel applications of online art teletherapy and multimedia use in art therapy as a relevant contribution to further the discussion on how we might cultivate deeper relational closeness despite the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic that separates us.