Arts Therapies with People with Physical Disabilities

Through her proactive approach to creative arts therapies, Marion Gordon-Flower makes a welcome contribution to our understanding of the resilience of people with communication and mobility challenges. Firmly grounded in a holistic appreciation of Jungian archetypes, her tailored diversity-informed interventions offer measured outcomes of unexpected agency for her participants. – Joanna Jaaniste, PhD, Career Development Fellow, Western Sydney UniversityThis is an exciting and original book, showing how people with a variety of physical disabilities can benefit from multimodal arts therapies, with thoughtful help from supporters. The archetypal approach provides a rich fund of stories to draw on, many based on Maori culture and multicultural narratives of the Pacific region. – Dr Marian Liebmann OBE, art therapist, workshop leader, and author of many art therapy booksMarion Gordon-Flower has crafted a long needed, seminal book on a multimodal arts therapies approach to working with people with physical disabilities. Her book, Arts Therapies with People with Physical Disabilities, provides the reader with a well-researched and clinically practiced theoretical framework for multimodal arts therapies, utilizing five expressive arts processes. In conjunction with these art processes, archetypal and symbolic images are explored to evoke each client’s personal, imaginative journey. How and why this therapeutic approach is so effective, with this often non-verbal population, is beautifully described and illustrated in the case studies that accompany the narratives on each of the expressive arts modalities. Gordon-Flower’s understanding of and commitment to this population is clearly evident in her description of the evolution of this approach and of her therapeutic arts interventions with those who participated. By the end of the book, I felt as if I had accompanied them on their journeys and had gained unique insights into their life experiences. – Mary K. McGraw, MA, ATR-BC, Co-Founder of Art Therapy Studio, Cleveland, OH, USA

Marion Gordon-Flower has been a full-time arts therapist for a rehabilitation service in Auckland where she spent eight years working in a multimodal arts therapy group programme for people with physical, developmental and intellectual disabilities. She lives in Auckland, New Zealand and now holds an arts therapist service management role in mental health.