Justine Wake
Ph. Pedro Puente
Stranger #5
Justine Wake, visual artist and art psychotherapist.
I’ve always been interested in how art can help people process traumatic events and shape stories that allow them to rebuild their identities. Justine introduced me to her practice as an art psychotherapist, sharing her wishes for the future and the path that led her here, carrying with her a quiet sense of motherhood. In our conversation, I could sense her kindness, calm, and wisdom about what it means to be a family woman, a mother, and, I would say, a feminist—aware that we are all different, that we cannot compare our ability to cope with someone else’s, and that life can come in and knock everything over. This is a conversation about creativity, care, and the awareness needed to embrace the unconventional.
How would you introduce yourself?
I’m in my mid-fifties, I have a family, I work as a psychotherapist, and I’m a practicing artist.
You’re known as a painter and assemblage artist, but also as a qualified art therapist with a Master of Mental Health, and a clinical member of PACFA and ANZACATA. Could you share some key moments in your journey that brought you to this intersection of art and therapy?
I’ve always practiced as an artist, but I’m not a trained artist—it’s just something I’ve done as a way of expressing myself, really all my life. About 25 years ago, I did a counselling course with an organisation, and at that time, many counsellors were training vocationally, on the job, which doesn’t happen anymore. I ended up working there, and over the thirteen years I spent with that organisation, I learned a lot of skills. Eventually I became a counselling supervisor there as well as a senior Counsellor.
At some point during that journey, someone suggested, “Why don’t you study art therapy?” I didn’t have any formal university qualifications in counselling or psychology at the time. I had a Bachelor of Arts in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies, which was extremely important and relevant to me but not formally related to counselling. So I’d done everything backwards, really. Practice first, study later!
When that person mentioned art therapy, I didn’t even know what it was. I wasn’t interested either—I didn’t want to merge those worlds. Counselling was my job, and although it was meaningful and fulfilling, art-making was soulful, something deeply personal, and I couldn’t see how they could go together. But the suggestion planted a seed.
Eventually, I went to an open day at the University of Queensland for their art therapy program, and I ended up enrolling in the master’s program, specialising in art psychotherapy. Even then, I felt conflicted about merging art and therapy. I went to see an art therapist myself to unpack what that barrier was. Looking back, I think it was a fear that I would be taking something away from my own art practice, something that was so important to me. That fear didn’t play out, but it felt like a real barrier at the time.
I overcame that fear, and since 2011, I’ve been practicing as an art therapist in a variety of settings and places.
What’s been the greatest challenge you’ve faced in your career — and how did it shape you?
There have been a lot of challenges. I think working in mental health, for many therapists, you are always using yourself as your primary tool, and many challenges come from your own blind spots—things you haven’t prepared for or haven’t learned yet. You’re working through that while also trying to do a good, responsible job as a therapist.
So I don’t think I could single out one particular challenge; there have been many. I supervise a lot of therapists now, and I often say that as a therapist, you never really reach a point where you’ve met your level of competency and can just settle in. It doesn’t really work like that. You’re always growing, always learning, and it’s necessary to keep doing that in this work. Working on self awareness and creating growth is really essential if you want to be a therapist—and I think it’s essential if you want to be an artist as well. So there’s an interesting connection there.
You’ve described yourself as a family woman — what does that mean in your life and work?
Like many people, I take that responsibility seriously because for those of us who are actively part of family systems, it’s your closest responsibility—the place where you can have the most impact. For many reasons, particularly with my children, that felt very important to me. I think I was able to sidestep a lot of the cultural narratives around parenting and really focus on what my partner and I felt we needed to do in relation to having children.
It feels like a big deal to be the architect of someone’s childhood, to provide the infrastructure, the learning, and the relationship lessons that a child will see through you as their caregiver. You’re the front line of that. Hopefully, you’re not the only person involved, but you are very much the first.
I’d been working as a counsellor for about three or four years before I had my first child, and I think that informed a lot of my perspective. I was working with children as a counsellor, and it’s such a privilege to hear the world through a child’s eyes. It taught me that what children really need is relationships that work.
When my kids were young, both my partner and I always tried to work part-time as much as we could, to be as available as we could. I was a shift worker for a long time, which meant I could shape my time around what the children needed. That felt like the most important thing, and I didn’t carry much conflict around that decision. I know that’s not the case for many women, so it’s interesting to look back on those choices now.
Nowadays, it’s very complex. I think that family women are facing decisions that women historically have never had to make, and it will be different for everyone. In my experience, it’s important that women and anyone who is caring for others, can sit with their own value system and prioritise in line with that.
I’ve talked with women for whom the best decision for themselves, their children, and their family was to work full-time, with their children in daycare, connected to community support in that way. For that family system, that was what allowed that person to be the best caregiver they could be. And of course for many caregivers there are no choices, economics push the decision.
It’s so individual. I think one of the beautiful legacies of feminism is that many people , at least in some parts of Western culture, can now make decisions about their lives based on their own values and the values of their family and culture, far more than was ever historically possible. That’s quite a profound change and can create an incredibly rich and interesting diversity.
In your artistic practice, you explore unconventional surfaces for painting, seeking a language that carries both the image and the character of the material. Could you tell me more about that, and what drives this research?
I think it probably started because of financial circumstances, initially. When I was young, I travelled a lot and worked in hospitality for about ten years before I became a counsellor. I basically worked to travel, living on and off for around a decade in London, Cape Town and a few other places.
I’ve always worked with what was around me. In my jobs during the 90’s, if I had a break at work, I’d grab a serviette and draw on it, then mail it home like a postcard for that day. I remember peeling labels off wine bottles and drawing on the backs of those, or using envelopes—just whatever was available. What I learned from doing that is that you can find beautiful qualities in unconventional things, and that materials interact differently with different surfaces. Even though I didn’t set out to explore that intentionally at the time, it’s something I absorbed.
Later, a lot of the art I made also involved my kids, using poster paints, cheap materials, and unconventional surfaces, and I learned a lot about how different things interact with one another. I found that conversation between material and surface very interesting.
Now, even though I have the means to buy a canvas or nice paper now, I still gravitate towards using packaging or unconventional materials, especially when I’m developing an idea. What I’m most interested in as a painter is not what I already know, but what I don’t know yet. Those unconventional surfaces help with that, because you can’t control them as much.
It seems like a metaphor for life…
I agree! I think we can kid ourselves, buying beautiful canvases and paints, setting up this illusion of control. Humans do that a lot—we like and often need to create the illusion of control to function —but it is an illusion. Life can come in and knock everything over. I quite like to purposely remind myself of that, with some regularity.
Art is a powerful tool to express feelings, communicate across cultures, and explore the complexity of the world. Yet many people still see it as inaccessible or difficult to engage with. What are your thoughts on that?
I agree. I think art can feel really inaccessible and even scary for many people. I wasn’t brought up in an environment that had any connection with the art world at all. I know that when I talk to my parents about art, we’ve had a lot of conversations about that feeling of, “I don’t know how I’m meant to look at this piece,” or “I don’t know how I’m meant to access this.”
Now, just because we’ve had those conversations, they’ve come to a place where they feel it’s okay to let something in, to simply like it without understanding why—and I would hope that for everyone around art.
I don’t think many artists set out to alienate people, but I think the structures artists often have to step into can do that. It’s a strange relationship, isn’t it? The relationship between institutions and artists, and then between the viewer and the art. It can feel like gatekeeping, and I think that’s a shame because art is one of the oldest forms of human expression. Historically there have been these categorisations around the art that gets ‘seen’. If you look at so-called folk art, there’s so much beautiful work and expression in that space, and yet it often gets segregated from what’s deemed important in the art world. That segregation is institutional and systemic. I like to think that is changing.
I find it interesting. I’m drawn to art that comes out of people’s lives—what some might call “outsider art ,” though I don’t really like that term, even if it’s useful. That kind of art feels pure; it comes directly from experience, and I think that resonates with people.
Of course, that’s not to devalue conceptual art or other art that exposes ideas, because that’s important too, especially right now, but I think there’s room for all of it.
As you once said, being creative is not the same as being artistic. From your perspective, what’s the difference?
I think creativity is something that’s constantly in motion within all humans. I’ve never met someone who isn’t creative. People often think they’re not creative, but I’ve never met a person who doesn’t have the capacity to be creative in some way.
Being artistic, on the other hand, has intention behind it. It’s motivated by a desire to put something visual out into the world on purpose. You set out to do that, to share it in some way as a form of expression.
Creativity, though, often happens very privately. That’s why many people say they’re not creative, when in reality they are. As an art therapist, many people say to me the first time we meet, “I’m curious about art therapy, but I’m not creative.” And it’s never true.
Could you tell me more about trauma-informed practices and why they’re so important in healing from complex trauma?
It’s a very big umbrella term. It incorporates many different ways of working with people, but at its essence, it’s about creating safety—helping someone feel safe and stable in an environment so they might be able to look at some of their traumatic experiences.
Of course, the way you create safety varies greatly from person to person. There’s a lot of discussion in the trauma literature around relationship-based trauma, for example, with children who have faced a lot of adversity in their childhood, often within the relationships they were in. When abuse happens in a child’s family of origin, we now know that it actually changes the way a child’s brain develops. That child grows up with a different type of brain, one that is more vulnerable to stress, more hypervigilant, and always looking out for danger. And that child doesn’t necessarily get to turn that off.
You can imagine a child going into a school environment, where there’s a lot of stimulation, potential conflict, and unpredictability. Their capacity to learn will be deeply impacted.
A trauma-informed approach in working with a child in a learning environment would mean taking into account that neurological experience—understanding what that child needs in order to feel safe in the classroom, and what will help (or hinder) their ability to learn. It’s quite complex, and it often takes time to figure out what that child needs.
That term, “trauma-informed,” gets used a lot now, but it’s actually quite a complex practice, and it really has to be approached on a person-to-person, individual basis.
How can art be a powerful tool in processing trauma?
There is a lot of neuroscience around this, and the research is Really starting to gain momentum, develop and become accessible.The way I think about it, is that when something overwhelming happens, we’re often very much in our bodies at the time of the experience. We’re not thinking or processing cognitively; we’re somatic, the experience is held by our body.
Because of that, trying to process the experience later using words and cognition can be quite hard, as that’s not how it was originally experienced. Using things like music, art, or movement can be more aligned with the original experience for a person. It can be a way to work something out without words, which often feels quite tricky for people who have been through very difficult experiences.
Art can also help externalise the experience. When we talk or think, it can still still sit within us, but if we put it over there, on a page, we can get some distance from it.
In art therapy, we often talk about the idea of “the triangle”: there’s the therapist, the person bringing their experiences , and there’s the art. Together, you can work with the piece of art—or whatever the person has created—and be curious about it, creating safety around how to explore it. It’s quite a dynamic, active way of working.
A lot of people assume that this approach is mostly for children, but that’s not the case at all. While I’ve worked with many children and young people, I’ve also worked a lot with adults. Most of those adults wouldn’t consider themselves artists, and most don’t make art outside of therapy, but art can be a powerful tool in their healing.
Do you think that the practice—art therapy—is still not considered a first choice?
Probably, yes, at least in Australia, that’s still the case, although it has changed a lot even over the course of my career.
One of my jobs was working within the hospital system, as part of adolescent mental services , and art therapy is recognised quite a lot within those child and adolescent mental health spaces. Most psychiatric multidisciplinary teams in child mental health units will have an art therapist and a music therapist on the team.
It’s a bit different in the adult mental health space, where art therapy is a little less recognised in Australia. It’s still acknowledged, but it’s rare for it to be framed as a primary part of treatment. This will hopefully keep changing though as there is growing research around using art therapy, particularly art therapy groups, with people experiencing eating disorders, for example.
But I think it’s still not the first thing that comes to mind for many people. Often, my colleagues and I find that we’re seen as the last resource. It’s interesting that it’s still seen as a bit “out there.” That doesn’t mean art therapists aren’t working with quite complex mental health challenges, and it can be tricky because by the time people reach us, they are often saying ‘I’ve tried everything else’ and there can be risks to navigate when someone has been in mental health suffering for many years with little relief.
Is there a dream project you’ve always wanted to realise, but haven’t had the chance to yet? What would it look like?
In relation to my own art practice, I would love to have more space for it. I’m definitely working toward creating more balance in my life so I can divide my time between my personal art practice and my therapy practice. For many years, my focus has been on my therapy work for financial and practical reasons but also because it can often feel more useful as a community member!
Art-making can be very all-consuming for me, and especially when my kids were younger, I was conscious of how much space it took up in my life and I did not want it to impact how I turned up as a parentSome people can manage both, and I know incredible women artists who are able to be deeply committed family people while also having a rich professional art practice. I was not confident I could do that. One of my dreams would simply be to have more hours in the week to practice art—not for any particular purpose, but just to get better and explore more.
Within my therapy practice, I would love to run groups using what’s called “studio practice” in art therapy. It’s a way of working where you create an open studio space for people to come in and work on projects, at times sharing with the group what they’re working on. It combines group psychotherapy with the environment and freedom of an art studio, using the group process while also having the scope of a creative space to support that.
It’s a difficult thing to run because it’s hard to create in an affordable way , and it’s also challenging to find a space that is both suitable for an art studio and confidential enough for therapeutic work. But I would really love to do that at some point, because I think group work is incredibly powerful. It creates a space where people can support one another as a community, and that feels very meaningful to me.
Name a person that inspires you or that you admire.
The person I would like to suggest is Sarah Seminutin. She is an arts practitioner, a carpenter, a social worker and one of the directors at a great art gallery and community space near me called Vacant Assembly.
“It has been great meeting you in recent times Sarah and to learn more about the way you approach things in co-directing the amazing community space Vacant Assembly.
To hold community health, creativity and artistic edginess all in mind at once is a really difficult balance and I find the way you do this hopeful & inspiring.
Thanks for all you do in our neighbourhood! ”
