Journal of Psychosocial Studies • vol 12 • nos 1-2 • 185–201 • © Policy Press 2019

Online ISSN 1478-6737 • [Link]

article
Psychosocial aesthetics and the art
of lived experience
Jill Bennett, [Link]@[Link]
Felt Experience & Empathy Lab [fEEL], University of New South Wales,
Sydney, Australia 

Lynn Froggett, Lfroggett@[Link]
Institute for Citizenship, Society and Change, Psychosocial Research Unit,
University of Central Lancashire, Preston, UK
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Lizzie Muller, [Link]@[Link]
Faculty of Art & Design, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia 
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This article identifies the distinctive nature of arts-based psychosocial enquiry and practice in a
public mental health context, focusing on two projects delivered as part of The Big Anxiety festival,
in Sydney, Australia in 2017: ‘Awkward Conversations’, in which one-to-one conversations about
anxiety and mental health were offered in experimental aesthetic formats; and ‘Parragirls Past,
Present’, a reparative project, culminating in an immersive film production that explored the
enduring effects of institutional abuse and trauma and the ways in which traumatic experiences
can be refigured to transform their emotional resonance and meaning. Bringing an arts-based
enquiry into lived experience into dialogue with psychosocial theory, this article examines the
transformative potential of aesthetic transactions and facilitating environments, specifically with
regard to understanding the imbrication of lived experience and social settings.

key words aesthetics • psychosocial • affordances • facilitating environment • lived experience

To cite this article: Bennett, J., Froggett, L. and Muller, L. (2019) Psychosocial aesthetics
and the art of lived experience, Journal of Psychosocial Studies, 12(1-2): 185–201,
DOI: 10.1332/147867319X15608718111023

Introduction
This article identifies the distinctive nature of arts-based psychosocial research and
practice in a public mental health context by focusing on two projects delivered as part
of The Big Anxiety festival in Sydney, Australia in 2017 – ‘Awkward Conversations’
and ‘Parragirls Past, Present’ – works that the authors were engaged in both producing
and evaluating. If the goal of psychosocial research and practice is to overcome the
abstraction of psychology from lived experience (and vice versa), we argue that

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arts-based methods offer both a potent means of understanding psychosocial processes

and of evolving strategies for supporting mental health and emotional wellbeing.
‘Arts-based, psychosocial’ refers to projects that work from and with lived experience,
examining the subjective aspects of that experience in dynamic relation to social,
material and institutional settings. It is specifically the capacity to activate and transform
a container–contained relationship (Bion, 1970) that defines this as a psychosocial
inquiry. By this we mean that the artwork, conceived as an intersubjective process,
performs a ‘metabolising’ and transformative function in relation to material that
may otherwise be hard to think of and hard to bear. Given this grounding in lived
experience, arts-based psychosocial practice is not exclusively or directly derived
from existing theory. As a bottom-up, generative endeavour, it makes a contribution
to knowledge in the field in a distinctively practical form that can be refined and
understood through dialogue with psychosocial theory (in our wider practice we
have evolved a protocol for formative evaluation; Bartlett and Muller, 2017; Muller
et al, 2018; Bennett et al, 2019).
Our approach as arts-based psychosocial researchers is grounded in the notion of
aesthetics as aesthesis (sense-based experience), which has been developed in a body
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of work spanning philosophy, art theory and psychoanalytic theory. Such work
emphasises the aesthetic as a sensori-affective realm of communication that is partly
unavailable to conscious awareness or verbal articulation (Bennett, 2005, 2012), and
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where trauma, pain or distress may manifest in embodied ways as the ‘unthought
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known’ (Bollas, 1987) or ‘implicit’ felt knowledge (Gendlin, 2009). This severs (or
at least loosens) the association of aesthetics with judgements of taste and beauty
– and its exclusive identification with art – and illuminates what Bollas regards as an
‘aesthetic intelligence’ at play in everyday sensory experience in all our interactions
with others and with the material world (Bollas, 1987, 1992; Bennett and Froggett,
2019). Everyday aesthetic transactions are the substance of art projects investigating
lived experience. In this article we aim to show how practice can yield a form of
enquiry into the aesthetics of lived experience that has the potential to make a specific
contribution to mental health and wellbeing.
The projects we discuss offer a terrain on which to investigate – and navigate –
the processes and effects of symbolic elaboration and specifically of presentational
symbolisation, which Suzanne Langer (1942, 1953) described as a process of finding
form for feeling, characteristic of art and music. Kenneth Wright (2009) points out
that the notion of a presentational symbol implies a container–contained structure,
which ‘shows forth’ rather than denotes that which it contains: ‘[S]uch a symbol
evokes and resonates with the experience stored within it, and from this perspective
the container-contained is a living structure consisting of inter-communicating
elements’ (Wright, 2009: 116). In this regard, we are interested not only in how the
arts accommodate and give expression to the vitality of lived experience but also
in how there might be a ‘carrying forward’ of this experience through aesthetic/art
[Link] enables us to develop art projects that make a practical contribution to
mental health and wellbeing, although for reasons outlined throughout this article, we
understand this contribution to reside in cultural practice rather than a health domain.
As practice-based researchers (Bennett is Director of The Big Anxiety festival,
responsible for the design of programmes; Froggett and Muller have been engaged in
its formative evaluation), we investigate this living structure of inter-communicating
elements (Gibson, 1979) not as a given but in terms of a field of affordances. Following

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Gibson, we understand affordances as the possibilities for action and experience that
exist in the relationships between the participants and the environments designed and
created within these projects. Designing with affordances in mind shifts the focus from
the idea of shaping or crafting ‘an experience’ to creating the potential for a repertoire
of active engagements. If affordances are perceived as opportunities for action, they
are also felt. The concept of the ‘affordance’ is derived from valence (Gibson, 1979:
138), referring to the emotional value associated with a stimulus, which in turn may
be linked to power relations. Affordances, which pertain to relational and sensory
interactions, are, of course, a mixture of intentional, accidental and emergent as the
creative process proceeds through cycles of action, evaluation and adjustment in situ
(Muller, 2012). As Winnicott (1951: 119)  pointed out: ‘[C]reativity can be destroyed
by too great insistence that in acting one must know beforehand what one is doing.’
In this article we discuss the practice of working with affordances to create generative
and containing settings.
These settings, which may also be understood as ‘facilitating environments’
(Winnicott, 1965), offer the opportunity for an expanded range of interactions and
therefore a potentially enriched lived experience. ‘Containment’ is envisaged as a
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guiding curatorial principle in presenting art relating to mental health (Bartlett and
Muller, 2017) and the facilitating environment that enables it emerges through a
practice-based process of development and testing on the ground.
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Our first example is a public engagement programme – ‘Awkward Conversations’ –

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in which affordances were crafted to create the potential for exchanges that might
help participants to articulate and to process objects of hitherto inexpressible anxiety,
reaching ‘non-help-seekers’ and the wider public. Our second example is a reparative
project that engaged participants in exploring the enduring effects of institutional
abuse in which affordances were (historically) systematically diminished and designed
to oppress. Developed with former residents of a child welfare institution in Parramatta,
Western Sydney, Australia, it culminated in an immersive 3D film called Parragirls
Past, Present. The goal here was to promote conversation between survivors that
not only expressed hard-to-articulate, traumatic experience but also located this
in the environment, bringing to visibility the emotional valences of interpersonal
communications in the present, and the effects of micro interactions in social and
institutional settings.

The Big Anxiety – festival of arts + science + people

Grounded in an understanding of subjectivity as an interactive process,The Big Anxiety
project uses cultural environments and practice to examine the psychosocial processes
whereby people engage with environmental factors that affect their own mental
health or that of others, and to envisage their redesign. As such, its events constitute
formative inquiry (which includes formal research) and knowledge creation through
engagement, as opposed to what within a conventional ‘medical model’ is termed
‘knowledge translation’ (implying the dissemination of already existing knowledge for
a lay audience of lesser expertise).The festival partners with the mental health sector
on these terms, addressing key deficits perceived within that sector – most notably,
the challenge that 65% of Australians with mental health difficulties do not seek help
– proposing that without richer methods of engagement and communication, this
65% cannot be reached. Its goal is to engage these non-help-seekers on new ground,

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creating settings or facilitating environments beyond the health sector that do not
define users as help-seekers. It takes seriously the fact that non-help-seekers, by virtue
of keeping out of the sector, are not medicalised subjects, identifying as ‘disordered’;
whatever the nature of their distress, these individuals’ needs are not currently met
by the affordances of service provision.
The festival project is motivated in part by the failure of mental health services
to adequately address lived experience in its own terms and specifically by concern
that complexity has been lost, due to the scientific reductionism of the dominant
research paradigm and the concomitant focus on what is easily identifiable and
measurable. This view is expressed in consumer-led calls to shift the attention from
diagnosis and disorder towards psychosocial experience and its determinants, as
expressed in the mantra: ‘It’s not what’s wrong with you, it’s what happened to you’
(Johnstone and Boyle, 2018: 9). Noel Hunter (2018) has also pointed to the loss of
nuanced understanding incurred in mental health with the waning of family-systems-
oriented therapies developed in the 1960s and 1970s. She notes that therapists in
this tradition advanced understanding of the toxic and insidious effects of covert
interpersonal dynamics (such as gaslighting, double-binds and scapegoating), locating
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psychological dysfunction within the family or social system (Laing and Esterson,
1964; Hunter, 2018). If this work is occluded by excessive focus on biomedical
psychiatric intervention, it is nevertheless re-entering popular discourse in a period
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where, after decades of silence, institutional abuse is finally recognised and where
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there is a significant cultural shift (exemplified by #MeToo campaign) in terms of

recognising behaviours of abuse. We suggest that arts-based psychosocial practice
enables not only the expression of individual lived experience but also its location
within often hostile and oppressive institutional and social networks. By attuning
to affordances we are able to explore covert interpersonal dynamics and the way in
which these are embedded and habituated. Moreover, as the example of the Parragirls
programme shows, doing so via an arts-based investigation gives trauma survivors
the means to do this themselves.

The Awkward Conversations programme

The Awkward Conversations programme created opportunities for conversation
in facilitating environments at public venues rather than in spaces that are coded as
either art or health settings. Fundamentally, it aimed to ‘design away’ the barriers to
holding a conversation, attending to institutional positioning, to affordances of place
and to how a conversation that is awkward and anxiety provoking becomes possible
and potentially transformative as a two-person engagement beyond the realm of
help-seeking. It was launched in 2017 in Customs House, a multipurpose site in
the tourist hub of Circular Quay, in Sydney, owned by the City of Sydney, housing
restaurants and a library and attracting a continual flow of visitors. The programme
was run from the front desk, with volunteers acting as concierges, taking visitors to
one-to-one bookable conversations held throughout the building and forecourt.
Twelve different types of conversation were available, each lasting around 15 to
20 minutes. They were hosted by artists and others with life experiences of anxiety,
neurodiversity and the mental health system. A conversation called ‘The S-word’,
addressing suicidality (‘for anyone who has ever thought about suicide – as well as
those who haven’t and feel they need to know more’) was delivered in a corner of

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the public library by Alessandro, a host with lived [Link] artist Dawn Joy
Leong hosted conversations in purpose-built adjacent pods, designed to accommodate
those not comfortable with close or face-to-face contact or the intrusive excesses
of ordinary environmental stimulation. First Nations artist Amala Groom hosted
a conversation about anxiety over a footbath using native medicinal plants. Other
conversations were informally situated on comfortable chairs in the library’s foyer
areas. Some made use of props (such as pens, paper and art materials), although the
majority did not. Another conversation involved a walk around the harbour with
Debra Keenahan, an artist with achrondroplasia dwarfism (see Figure 1).
With the goal of engaging with the general public, including non-help-seekers
who may require support, the aesthetic focus of the project lay in creating conditions
where host and visitor could enter into a respectful dialogue in which the lived
experience of both might be [Link], there was an offer to connect through
experience in so far as it felt possible within the parameters of the conversation, but
no expectation that participants should disclose personal information.
Hosts, drawing on their own lived experience, were invited to identify and arrange
the spaces (with or without props) in which conversations occurred, and attention
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was paid to the comfort of transition via the role of the volunteer concierges who
also served as ‘minders’ at a discrete distance from the conversation. The design of
the overall programme and the individual conversations was thus shaped through
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attention to the affordances of the whole situation.

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The settings of the awkward conversations were created through purposefully

crafting relational possibilities between the people and elements that are felt emotionally
(attending to temperature, noise level, visibility, physical comfort, proximity and
so on) in each situation, with the goal of engendering an easily accessible, public
but relatively secure and semi-private facilitating environment (Winnicott, [1965]
1990). Leong’s conversation pods, for example, were constructed out of translucent
diaphanous material and conceived from the artist’s autistic sensibility to support not
only respite from sensory overload in the city but an experience of being ‘together
but separate’ in dual pods.
If the practice-based approach to creating this space builds on Gibson’s work, our
understanding of its operation owes more to the classic Winnicottian conception of
a holding environment that is not just ‘supportive’ but also able to secure or ‘hold’

Figure 1: Awkward conversations at Customs House, Circular Quay, and Debra Keenahan’s
awkward conversation walk

Source: The Big Anxiety, 2017; photograph by Gisella Vollmer, Skyline Productions.

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the conditions in which a potential space can arise. Beyond its common-sense
advantages for conversation, the value of constituting such an environment in an
arts-based activation is to provide a temporary counterpoint to the relative lack of a
secure holding in society at large. The awkward conversation settings had to create
conditions where people had permission (and literally the guidance of concierges)
to walk up and enquire about the things they had wanted to know but had always
been afraid to ask – or to seek some initial support for unmet needs, even though it
was made clear that this was not a counselling service.
Capitalising on the potential for mental health conversation beyond the health
sector, we also sought to preserve and play with a sense of the awkwardness attached
to conversation about mental health. One of the hosts encapsulated this in reporting
that he felt able to be his ‘awkward self ’, in contrast to working within a mental health
setting where one is expected to be ‘on message’. One of the participants similarly
reported (via a festival survey): ‘Feels very positive to be able to talk about difficult
subject matter without having to filter or downplay.’
Rather than disavowing or overcoming awkwardness, we sought to use its
transformative potential as something that under the right conditions can impel rather
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than obstruct a conversation.

Recoding the locus of conversation as an aesthetic space enables a process of feeling
into and articulating each conversational partner’s aesthetic presence (described by
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Bollas, 1995, as ‘idiom’). Each engagement in principle had to get to a point where
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it felt good as well as stimulating. This is not to distinguish the ‘pleasure’ of the arts
from the functionality of therapy: ‘aesthetic moments are not always beautiful or
wonderful … many are ugly and terrifying but nonetheless profoundly moving
because of the existential memory tapped’ (Bollas, 2011: 12). In this context, a

Figure 2: The Big Anxiety poster

Source: The Big Anxiety, 2017.

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conversation that feels good is one in which apprehending the aesthetic presence
of the other becomes possible because there is no compulsion to airbrush the
awkwardness of the encounter.
Accordingly, participants reported a range of emotions:

• ‘Anxious at first. Proud once had actually spoken to someone.’

• ‘Overwhelmed but it felt like a necessary conversation.’

They also ascribed positive sensation and emotion to the apprehension of the other:

• ‘[Link] conversations were really comforting, and the artists were really
giving.’
• ‘Fulfilled and liberated by the ability to engage in meaningful conversations with
strangers.’
• ‘Not awkward at all. It was the first time I had the opportunity to speak to
another person who had a similar express of mental illness to me.’
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In general, participants reported feeling positive as a result of the encounter:

• ‘Really engaged and stimulated.’

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• ‘Open, confident, supported.’

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• ‘Energised, stimulated and engaged.’

• ‘More connected to other people.’

Artist Debra Keenahan’s walking conversation incorporated a further dimension,

co-opting ambient social interactions into the awkward conversation experience to
promote a level of empathic unsettlement (LaCapra, 2001), while nevertheless ensuring
the supportive holding environment of the one-to-one conversation. While many
of the other hosts had lived with anxiety associated with neurodiversity or mental
health issues, Debra identifies as disabled in respect of achondroplasia dwarfism and,
for her, anxiety comes from a hostile and disabling environment. It is a product of
everyday social interaction, originating in the unease of others and the intrusiveness
of their gaze. In Debra’s words: “I will no longer be disabled when I can walk down
a street in peace.”
Her 15-minute walk brought into play the hostile environment through which
she and her companion moved. The stares, comments, abuse and photography that
her presence elicited were, in effect, part of the material fabric of the work. At one
point in each conversation, Debra invited her companion to stand still and watch
what happened behind her back while she proceeded alone for some 50 metres and
then turned back towards them. Up to this point the two had been walking side
by side but now the companion became a spectator in a live tableau as subtle and
not-so-subtle intrusions unfolded. Invariably, some passers-by turned to stare, others
blatantly captured photographs (volunteers sometimes had to intervene when people
assumed the right to photograph Debra after privacy was requested).
Debra (having psychology training) had studied the prevalence of an avoidant/
resistant response to the ‘novel stimulus’ of a body that is unlike one’s own. In her
everyday experience, most people display reticence; at best unconfident in how to
approach or meet her eye, at worst stigmatising and avoidant, with those lacking

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impulse control more overt in their response. Her expectation was that in facilitating
an experience-near (Geertz, 1974) engagement, empathy could be engendered, not
as a moral ideal but as a stance cultivated through perspective sharing and the act of
‘being with’.Any detached expression of pity or moral indignation could be undercut
by the face-to-face encounter. Thus, the experience promotes what LaCapra calls
‘empathic unsettlement’ (LaCapra, 2001) but of a kind that arises from affective
attunement (Stern, 2004; Gobodo-Madikizela, 2015: 1,104).
Gobodo-Madikizela’s Kleinian-informed approach to public victim–perpetrator
encounters during the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (Bennett,
2005; Gobodo-Madikizela, 2015) is instructive here on the cultivation of empathy
via face-to-face encounter. Public settings that carefully constitute facilitating
environments may, argues Gobodo-Madikizela (2015: 1,099), serve as potential spaces
facilitating the ‘emergence of unexpected moments that might create connections’.
In other words, the experience-near encounter brokered within the facilitating
environment can be the basis for imagining and feeling one’s way into the other’s
perspective, experiencing and responding to their idiom and thus for humanising
them and laying the basis for empathy.
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Gobodo-Madikizela, herself a psychoanalytic psychologist, professes amazement

at ‘the idea that the imagination is necessary even to recognize the existence, the
human beingness, of the other’ (Gobodo-Madikizela, 2015: 1,111) (amazement
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was, of course, what was experienced in Debra’s awkward conversation by stunned

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participants). Although ‘extraordinary’, this idea is borne out in the encounters that
Gobodo-Madikizela brokered during and following the Truth and Reconciliation
Commission, which lend support to Benjamin’s (1990, 1999, 2004) conceptualisation
of ‘mutual recognition’ as the core of intersubjectivity through which ‘the subject
gradually becomes able to recognize the other person’s subjectivity’ (Benjamin, 1990:
33; Gobodo-Madikizela, 2015). Benjamin (2004: 5) describes ‘a relation in which each
person experiences the other as a “like subject,” another mind who can be “felt with,”
yet as a distinct and separate centre of feeling and perception’. Gobodo-Madikizela
suggests that: ‘The “caring-for” element in empathy is the result of a deeper level
of imagination and understanding of the other’s experience. This deeper level of
imagination takes “feeling into” the mental state of the other to another level, and
asks the question, What should I do about it?’ (Gobodo-Madikizela, 2015: 1,112).
For Debra it was essential to reach this point of asking: ‘What should I do about
it?’ In the event, Debra reported that three of her walking companions were shaken
and moved to tears after witnessing the extent of this stigmatising behaviour in a live
enactment. For her, this emotional reaction was unplanned but not entirely surprising –
and within the holding space formulated for the conversation, such well-intentioned,
affectionate responses could be effectively supported, processed and discussed. Saying
‘I’m so sorry!’ is not for Debra a useful response, particularly since it calls upon her to
then take care of the participant/bystander whose own emotion becomes the focus.
The potential for being with and feeling into is thus carefully brokered by Debra as
a shifting perspective onto the environment; at the end of the walk the companion is
literally ‘drawn in close’ to arrive not at a place of full identification or appropriation
but at a point of asking: ‘What are the options for action?’
From the intrusiveness, abuse and aggression of the public reactions to Debra, we
also have clues to the shame that may have been provoked in participants at their
own unseemly or prurient curiosity, along with a desire to know more and also a

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fear of causing harm. The maternal facilitating environment that Winnicott had in
mind was one in which the child may come to recognise and test the limits of their
own phantasised destructiveness and here it is not only the holding but also the
resilience of the ‘surviving’ mother that enables her to be recognised as a ‘like subject’
to be ‘felt with’. Similarly, if a relatively unconstrained exchange was to occur in an
awkward conversation, it required confidence in the survival of the host who could
moderate without retaliating with any aggressive inquisitiveness on the part of the
conversational partner. Debra’s expressed confidence in her own resilience comes
primarily from a lifetime of learning from experience (Bion, 1970) where she has
developed, as our example shows, the capacity to think in the face of continual
adverse reactions – what Bion likened to ‘thinking under fire’. Art practice here is
guided by intuitive moves, which are in fact the mobilisation of past experiences
and reflection applied to a unique situation (Muller, 2012) and can be understood as
forms of ‘aesthetic intelligence’ in action. In the case of Debra’s walking conversations
these are sustained by the aesthetics of the encounter and the affordances of the total
situation, which included the volunteers as concierges, the framing and boundaries
of the conversations and their material design.
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The ‘Parragirls Past, Present’ project

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Parragirls is the name adopted by former residents of the Parramatta Girls Home (PGH),
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a state-controlled child welfare institution, adjacent to the convict-era Parramatta Female

Factory in Western Sydney, Australia. In 2017, five Parragirls – Bonney Djuric, Lynne
Paskovski, Gypsie Hayes, Jenny McNally and Tony (Denise) Nicholas – collaborated with
artists Lily Hibberd,Volker Kuchelmeister and Alex Davies, on Parragirls, Past, Present, an
experimental 3D immersive film (23 minutes long, screened in an immersive theatre
or virtual reality headset). The film emerged from a longer-term community project
with the women who had been committed to PGH as teenagers in the 1970s, having
been deemed by the Children’s Court to be neglected, uncontrollable or exposed
to moral danger. The PGH regime was harshly punitive and girls were subjected to
physical, emotional and sexual abuse. In 2017, the report of the Royal Commission into
Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse brought to public attention the scale of
such abuse (Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse,
2017a) and a governmental apology followed in 2018 (Morrison 2018). Produced at the
time the women were testifying to the commission, and with the buildings and grounds
facing redevelopment, the film was conceived by the women to capture, document and
imaginatively re-inhabit the site on new terms.
The women’s aim was not to evoke the horrors of the past (they are averse to
sensationalising media coverage) but to take possession of the site and its representation
in the present. Having lived for more than 40 years with the institutional denial of
their abuse, freighted with the authority of official descriptions, making peace now
entails wresting back control of the site’s contested meaning. For this primary reason,
the creative team of the Parragirls Past, Present project and collaborating artists
undertook terrestrial and aerial surveys to capture the whole complex. Rather than
simply making a narrative film, the goal was to recreate the site and the experience of
moving through it. No figures appear on screen, but the voices of the women guide
us into and through the immersive experience, beginning with a recollection of the
brutality of entering remand as we pass inside the walled compound:

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‘When you go into any remand, you go for internal examinations. Now,
you’re virgins at this time.… I remember being held down by staff members
forcing internal … you’re screaming and the police are standing there and
they’re not doing a thing. And you were really scared … after the brutal
examination … you are thinking what the hell else is going to happen to ya?’

Photorealistic imagery of a corridor and sandstone ‘dungeon’ area, of a segregation

room and a laundry – each sparking different recollections – are interspersed with
point-cloud [Link], while topographically accurate, create an aesthetic
of fragmentation as objects and surface textures appear to break into pixels –
delicate luminescent points of colour that ‘simultaneously generate the perception
of authenticity and scientific accuracy while presenting a fragmented and broken
world’ (Kuchelmeister et al, 2018: 3).The project, however, is not simply about what
is remembered but how it is remembered, encountered and shared in a context where
the truth of the women’s experience was systematically denied and undermined, often
leaving them with only the defences of dissociation and self-harm.
Psychoanalytic trauma theorists have drawn attention to the impossibility of
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witnessing massive psychic trauma during its occurrence. The force of the event
precludes its registration, such that it is ‘a record that has yet to be made’ (Laub, 1991:
57). Moreover, within a totalitarian architecture, ‘the inherently incomprehensible
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and deceptive psychological structure of the event precludes its own witnessing’
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(Laub, 1995: 65). As such, there were minimal but significant affordances enabling
resistance in PGH, as the women’s testimony to the Royal Commission affirms: ‘[A]t
Parramatta Girls Home, there was nowhere for any of the girls to go to talk” (Royal
Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, 2017b, case study
7, exhibit 17.29) but in the film the women describe escape attempts, the practice
of scratching graffiti into the sandstone (which Bonney calls a “really remarkable act
of defiance”, given the punishment), the hiding of pins from the industrial sewing
room under the skin and the practice of harming their own bodies as a means to
register survival:

‘My existence was my own damage. And that was my own bodily injuries.
I chose that over the scratching because I was terrified of the consequence.
And so, I marked myself and chose that way of seeing my own blood instead
of seeing my name on a wall.’

The film voiceover, created and spoken by the women, emerged through initial
experiments in which they roamed the site in pairs, recording their conversations,
and comparing memories and perceptions. Thus, the voiceover is less a narration
for an imagined audience, than an emergent discussion. As with the Awkward
Conversations project, the aesthetic technique was intended to promote a process
of elaboration within a holding space – with the distinction that, in this case, the
facilitating environment had to be engendered within the walls of the Parramatta
site. It is in this very profound sense, that Parragirls Past, Present differs from objective
(or sensationalising) reports of the site’s notorious [Link] aim – and unique capacity –
of the immersive film as an arts-based psychosocial inquiry was to locate the
continuing effects of trauma in present-day interactions (see Figure 3). It is in this
way that we come to understand the force of institutionalised discourse.

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Jenny McNally relates two key examples, each located at particular sites:

‘If we had muster, that’s where they’d stand and that’s why I was so offended
when the FaCS [Family and Community Services] worker stood up there
and started reciting the history of Parramatta Girls Home and getting it all
wrong. And I just told her how I felt she was so flippant about the whole of
Parramatta Girls Home. And how easy it fell; all this garbage fell out of her
mouth that was so non-factual. And I just saw outrage….’
‘Actually, it was very hard for me to bear. I just wanted to scream at her
because she was lording over us. And the sad thing was she turned to me and
said: “And who are you?” And I went regimented and I said my name. What
I should have told her was: “Go f… go fuck yourself, love.” I said my name
because she was standing on the step and I just transformed into an insignificant
nothing and responded in the expectation that a superintendent would expect
me to respond. And, oh, I was beside myself that that had happened. I was so
angry that someone could turn me so quickly with: “And who are you?”‘
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Such paralysis – often described in terms of ‘triggering’ – may be understood

as replaying originary trauma in a process that Freud (1991) characterised as
Nachträglichkeit, or ‘afterwardsness’, whereby later memories, struggles and the partial
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work of healing vanish and the trauma is reconstructed retroactively – as if time

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and Nachträglichkeit memory had not elapsed. The paralysis returns, unbidden and
unanticipated in an unresolved repetition not only of the experience but also of the
relations of powerlessness associated with the silencing – a ‘deferred obedience’ (Freud
and Breuer, [1895] 2004) to an internalised and cruel authority.
In this retelling, the tables are turned on that [Link] audience is confronted
not only with the painful legacy of abuse but also with a sense of how authority is

Figure 3: Parragirls Past, Present (viewer in immersive 3D film)

Source: The Big Anxiety, 2017; photograph by Saeed Khan/AFP.

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 Jill Bennett et al

still assumed without question or insight within institutional settings in ways that
re-enact coercive power relations. For the survivors themselves, the film – and the
film-making process – may be considered as a potential space that has the effect of
expanding affordances for action. In this context, the potential space enables the settled
convention of authority to be refigured and reimagined so that agency now resides
with the women themselves finding expression in an aesthetic object of their creation.
The ‘paralysing’ event recollected is not represented visually but is situated within
the institutional architecture in a manner quite distinctive to immersive 3D film,
which moves the viewer into and around the unpopulated grounds. Space in this
experiential medium is not a backdrop but appears to open up and enclose; space,
this time round, is made for the women’s experience. At the point at which Jenny
experienced the violence of silencing ‘internally’, the film enables the registration of
this experience: the space onscreen, depicting the vacated site of PGH, is momentarily
stilled, so that it is envisaged as containing a felt response: a silent scream. It is a space
where this can now be witnessed.
On a second occasion, described by Jenny, a visitor’s response is even more
insensitive:
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‘We all went back to Bethel. Bonney was telling the history and one of
the men turned around and said: “If all of these rapes happened, where are
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all the pregnancies? Where are all the babies?” And I was nearly sick. I was
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nearly sick. And Bonney answered so well. She just said: “They knew our
cycle.” And I went outside and I … I don’t know if anyone’s … I’m sure
people have experienced this … I went outside and I was so explosive with
that comment. I was so explosive with it. And I went outside and I did a
silent scream. And I just stood there with my hands up thinking: “How dare
anyone speak like that in front of us?”

Towards the climax of the film, this account of a devastating interaction is given its
own expansive space; the camera moves away and up from the building mentioned,
opening up a caesura at the spot where Jenny remembers herself standing,“hands up,
thinking”.The camera surveys the scene from above so that the women’s voices now
speak to and of the site below. As the camera continues to pan out encompassing the
entire site, in an oblique aerial view, we hear on the soundtrack the women’s plea
that government authorities must be answerable so that nothing like this will happen
[Link] calling to account reflects the dual purpose of testimony; Laub (1995: 63)
says of his work with Holocaust survivors that they ‘did not only need to survive to
tell their stories; they also needed to tell their stories in order to survive’.
In the film, Jenny talks about her dismay at being punished for nothing, describing
her refusal to stay silent as a question of survival: “I have never hurt anyone. I just
had a mouth on me, you know. I could have shut up, but I felt if I’d ever shut up,
I wouldn’t be who I am today.” Jenny’s published testimony (Royal Commission
into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, 2017b, case study 7, exhibit
17) details a catastrophic failure of care, compounded at every level (family, school,
church, welfare, government and judicial process). Throughout it, she describes how
screaming was her only recourse, sometimes effective in the short term in warning
off abusers, more often eliciting beatings. “I was screaming out and nobody would
listen. Nobody heard. But I was so noisy, I don’t understand how nobody heard”

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(Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, 2017b: 7.

17.40 case study 7, exhibit 17, 40).
The truth is that there was noise. Many people – parents, teachers, ministers, police
officers, mental health professionals, welfare workers and PGH staff – heard; but
nobody listened. Even a psychiatrist professes herself unable to understand why Jenny
would ‘muck up’.Yet, as Winnicott (1958) argued, the apparent ‘antisocial’ tendency of
children must be ‘met’ and understood as a reaction to environmental deprivation; that
is, as a reaction to the lack of a facilitating or holding environment, notwithstanding
“the roof over your head” for which Jenny was told by Child Welfare to be grateful
(Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse, 2017b: 7.
17.14 case study 7, exhibit 17, 14). If the Royal Commission was able to bring to light
the truth of institutional abuse, Parragirls Past, Present played a different reparative role.
As Bollas (1992: 70) explained:‘[T]he work of trauma is to sponsor symbolic repetition,
not symbolic elaboration.’ It is in the possibility of symbolic elaboration that we find
the key to understanding the contribution of an artwork, especially one that brings
memories of the past vividly into the present – not only as narrative re-enactment
but also as ‘lyric’ creation, experienced immersively in the moment (Abbott, 2007).
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For the Parragirls, the film – and associated aesthetic process – offered a container
for resymbolisation, within which trauma could be transformed into psychic genera
(‘something that will link with and possibly elaborate the psychic material that is
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incubating into a new vision’; Bollas, 1992: 79). Such symbolic elaboration is an essential
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counterpart of the political repositioning of the self as ‘survivor’.Without it, survivalism

is brittle, subject to setbacks, and can collapse into the dynamics of ‘doer’ and ‘done to’
that characterise the sadomasochistic relationship (Benjamin, 2004). The conclusion
of the Royal Commission (Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child
Sexual Abuse, 2017a) and its wider reporting inevitably represented both welcome
acknowledgement of and a risk of disappointment and loss of control over the narrative,
which the women sought to mitigate by generating their own project out of their
recovery process. Most importantly, this was grounded in their aesthetic perception,
felt experience and sensibility – to which no space had ever previously been given.
The film offered a context in which the women’s memories could in some sense
be objectified in the materiality of the setting. The challenge was to work with the
affordances of the environment, transforming them through the site exploration
and film making so that from a locus of oppression the buildings and grounds of
PGH became an arena for the realisation of a hard-won resilience. In contrast to the
discursive space of media exposure that is opened up in stories of the ‘scandal’ of
Parramatta, the artistic process enabled the women to access the potential spaces of
creative imagination that found expression in the narrative and imagery of the film –
not a documentary but an aesthetic rendering of a structure of feeling (Williams,
1981) associated with the walkways and empty rooms of a place that now appeared
less substantial through the shifting, breaking patterns of spectral point-cloud light.
The point of making an artwork of the experience is neither testimony nor
representation. While the story is told in the voiceover, something of the quality of
feeling aroused for the Parragirls is made experientially available to the audience –
but through the aesthetic containment of the film. In this context there is a reparative
aspect (felt and told) to the replaying of fragments of traumatic memory, now
transformed, resymbolised and overlaid with a narrative of survival. What is at stake
here is [Link] Jenny articulates in a subsequent video interview:“I think that’s

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the most amazing thing.… That I was believed. … to have my first-born son, who was
taken from me through Parramatta, say: ‘Mum, this is stunning and now I understand
your story, I understand who you are.’ It gave me back my reality.…” (McNally, 2017).

Conclusion
In this article we have interwoven two forms of enquiry: creative practice-based
research where enquiry into the aesthetics of lived experience is a driving force;
and psychosocial evaluation of the engagements that take place in a collaborative
arts project. From a practice perspective we have highlighted the relational work of
designing with affordances – felt opportunities for action that allow for an active
empathic engagement that neither demands nor allows a participant to easily co-opt,
normalise or resolve the experience of another.
An awkward conversation is therefore not only awkward by virtue of its subject
matter – its affordances enable active work with the discomfort that arises in the
conversational dyad rather than seeking to ameliorate or ‘art-wash’. The facilitating
environment favours an ‘optimal graduated awkwardness’ (to paraphrase Winnicott),
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which can moderate inquisitiveness, embarrassment or diffidence by supporting both

the self-awareness of the participant and the resilience of the ‘surviving’ host. The
aim is to create the conditions of mutual recognition in which the reality of another
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is not so much explained as revealed in the encounter – a learning from experience

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(Bion, 1970) where it can be apprehended and thought about.

The knowledge acquired in the process does not substitute for a critique of
medicalised mental health systems or for therapeutic practice. Arts projects such as
the one described in this article seek another route to shared understanding of mental
distress, which, following Alford’s (1989) interpretation of Klein, can be seen as a quest
for empathic knowing that is rooted in Caritas, rather than Eros, where the desire
for knowledge benefits the knower. Such a quest aims to achieve a compassionate
knowing without impinging on or damaging the object: love as Caritas ‘lets its object
be’, rather than appropriating the other.
As interest grows in accounting for the mental health benefits of art, there is a risk
that measurable dimensions extraneous to lived aesthetic experience are foregrounded.
A theorisation of art’s transformative potential therefore becomes ever-more necessary.
This can be derived – as we have indicated – from Bollas’s (1987) account of aesthetic
transformation, which expands Winnicott’s (1958) conception of the ‘environment-
mother’ to include its aesthetic aspect: ‘The mother’s idiom of care and the infant’s
experience of this handling is one of the first, if not the earliest human aesthetic. [It]
will predispose all future aesthetic experiences that place the person in subjective
rapport with an object’ (Bollas, 1987: 32–3).
For Bollas, the expectation of being transformed by a process arises from the
manner of the mother’s tending through which she expresses her own distinctive
idiom – ‘never cognitively apprehended but existentially known’ (Bollas, 1987: 16),
shaping in her child an aesthetic intelligence that will be elaborated throughout life.
Creative practice is likewise intuitively concerned with creating the conditions – the
facilitating environment – through which the transformative aesthetic moment can
be realised. This entails a delicate negotiation between control (the drive towards a
strong aesthetic outcome) and the potential space that ‘lets the object be’, or ‘become’,
while holding the arena of engagement.

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The Parragirls Past, Present project was coextensive with a public reckoning alongside
which a different need arose – for a holding situation – no longer the forensic knowing
and exposing of what had [Link] the extent that the Parragirls Past, Present film
engenders the feeling of containment, it is the registration of a process by which the
women determined to create a vehicle that could hold their [Link] impulse
then was a reparative re-inhabiting of the site, finding in its imaginative re-creation an
alternative set of affordances. Rather than the repetition of incommunicable trauma,
working with the potential spaces in the immersive film offered an opportunity for
symbolic elaboration. Experience is thereby ‘interanimated’:

The work of trauma will be to collect disturbing experience into the network
of a traumatic experience (now a memory and an unconscious idea) while
the play work of genera will be to collect units of received experience that
interanimate towards a new way of perceiving things. (Bollas, 1992: 78)

Thus, the Parragirls Past, Present project exemplifies aesthetic work in the limit case
of massive trauma, itself marked by the systemic deprivation of a potential space that
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would enable a refiguring of their relations to that trauma. It enables listening and
hearing and opens up the possibility of an empathic response.
In bringing the knowledge generated in practice-based enquiry into dialogue
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with psychoanalytically informed conceptions of the conditions and nature of

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aesthetic experience, we have aimed in this article to elaborate a concept of ‘aesthetic

intelligence’ at work through a distinctively psychosocial lens. We have shown how
such an approach can in practical ways enable the fundamental components of an
empathic response, and how and why such a response must be actively enabled where
inhospitable conditions exacerbate anxiety and trauma. Through greater aesthetic
attunement we can provide options for action.

Acknowledgements
Special thanks to Jenny McNally, Bonney Djuric and Debra Keenahan.

Funding details
Our research is supported by an Australian Research Council Linkage Grant, ‘Curating
Third Space’.

Conflict of interest
The authors declare that there is no conflict of interest.

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