The Lost Studio: “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”

Abstract

The subtitle is from a Joni Mitchell song and the line continues ”˜they paved paradise, put up a parking lot’. I felt something of that sentiment through a recent experience of losing the art therapy studio in which I had worked for 17 years. This experience made me think about the elements I missed and why they were important to me. In this paper I will briefly describe the studio spaces created within three different social contexts, all driven by government legislation, they are: the mental asylum, care in the community, and managed care. I will then focus on one particular element: the display of pictures in the room providing containment for the therapist.