About

Greetings! My name is Alison. I'm an artist and therapeutic arts practitioner based in Naarm/Melbourne, Australia.

 

My journey with therapeutic arts began in 2021, during Covid-19 lockdowns. What began as a lockdown pastime of making ceramic sculptures, became the start of a very personal and grounded artistic practice. 

​

A big part of my journey and creative expression has involved plant medicine and strengthening my connection to nature. I believe that creative expression is for humans the same instinct that bees have to make honey, or beavers intuitively building dams (how do they just know hydraulic engineering?!). Creative expression is something all humans just do all the time. We are a story-telling animal. 

 

Unlike bees, we aren't all making or expressing the same kind of thing.... but, much like beavers, we can build better things for ourselves when we engage with our intuitive processes of creative inquiry. Our creative expressions can help us to discover more about ourselves, our relationships to others, and how we connect with the world around us. 

 

I am currently studying a Masters in Therapeutic Arts Practice at the MIECAT institute, a program which fosters experiential and multimodal ways of inquiring through the arts. There is an emphasis on relational, embodied, and reflective learning, integrating creative processes such as movement, sound, writing, and visual arts to explore human experience and meaning-making.

​

I am developing my skills in companioning, embodied awareness, and arts-based inquiry, while learning to work ethically and relationally. My study combines deep personal inquiry with professional application, culminating in practical skills that I am able to apply in real-world contexts.

​

After the Masters, I hope to go on to study the Professional Doctorate to be able to support others in creative, therapeutic, and community settings—combining artistic exploration with compassion, reflexivity, and a grounded understanding of the human experience... also, I think being called "Dr. Bigg" would be pretty cool.

​

If you've read this far down the page, thank you. I hope we get to work together at some point and do a bit of arts-based research together! ​​​

​

 

​

 🍄🌿 

Alison J Bigg 

​

​