Exploring the art/creative process through masks making and playing: Continuity, disruption, resilience

This article describes an arts therapy training workshop held at the 3rd International Conference of the European Federation of Art Therapy at Brunel University of London in July 2025. Based on the consideration that any new construction is actually a re-construction, artists, philosophers, health professionals, sociologists and anthropologists explore over time the art/creative process both in its specificities and for its use in arts therapies. Art accompanies personal and social emotional regulation and change, responding to the fundamental need of our aesthetic brain to produce beauty, harmony and balance. In this workshop, a theoretical presentation introduced a few concepts on the merging of the art, the therapeutic and the art therapeutic transformative process. The second part of the workshop was dedicated to a practical exploration of the creative steps and challenges, with an expressive therapies continuum approach. Creating paper masks and playing them offered a group of fifteen participants the opportunity to experience a complex pathway to face continuity and disruption in the polyvalent, constructive/destructive reality of the creative process. Facing specific challenges in the art process helps to develop resilience and facilitates the access to the core of the arts therapies. In clinical contexts, specific relationships are fostered through empathic creativity. The choice of working with masks is due to the potential of this media to deal with complex issues in a therapeutic context. In this workshop, both individual creative work and group cooperation offered material for discussion and sharing among professionals. Possible applications in art and drama therapy practice focus on the implementation of a healing continuity from disruption to resilience.