Reclaiming Beauty: An Expressive Arts Compilation Honoring the Healing Process for Survivors of Commercial Sexual Exploitation

Käthe Kollwitz

The work of Käthe Kollwitz, a German artist during the world wars who documented the exploitation of workers and the horrors of war through artwork.  

For Cyndee

This made me think of you when I saw it this morning!

http://www.free2work.org/trends/apparel/

Progress

Expressive Arts collection in tribute to survivors of sexual exploitation.

Survivor image.. seedling grappling a monster (the latter yet to be visualized, and thus is not yet on the canvas) but in spite of the struggle new life is emerging into daylight.  (Seedling colors will be more vivid).

Escape image

Concept of the kids pictured having crawled through the window, which will contain imagery giving a frame of reference to what they escaped.  A third figure will have his head in his hands, the girl on the left has hands over her mouth (drawn in pencil currently) and the girl on the right will be brought to the foreground.  From E's story.

Image yet to make this page... 

Rekindling hope: shadowy figures with an unlit lamp inside each of their chests.  A hand coming from off canvas, striking a match.  

Still Yet Unresolved

Traveling light it seemed to be so simple

til the complications caught up,

as they tend to do.

She put up a fight, flung her fists in a fury

whirled around to find the door

hand on handle but not so sure.

She studied the fixture for a minute moment

its frame seemed solid oaken wood,

yet at a touch it crumbled, sapped of reason

dry of rhyme, she slipped in between time.

Wilderness comprised of concrete and telephone wires

where signals cross and static reigns.

Would you be surprised immersed in raw reality

how blatant lies so swiftly fuse with all she classifies as true.

Relentless currents pull her further, deeper still

subtle to seem as evoking her own choice.

Incongruous logic and sentiment with a tinge

of rebellious ways, fingerprints proving

her self-perceived blame.

Wilderness comprised of concrete and telephone wires

where signals cross and static reigns.

Would you be surprised immersed in raw reality

how blatant lies so swiftly fuse with all she classifies as true.

Found object sculpture: I have quite a selection of metal scraps and objects to connect to allude to the idea that beauty can prevail even in what others have thrown away.  I've been brainstorming how to structure this piece, but don't fully know yet.

Poetry:  I've started three ideas of poems, but the drafts are still too unsatisfactory to my own inner critic to share with you quite yet, my dear class.  Jay Wentworth has offered to help me edit the poems as I work with them.  

What I'm struggling with is how to tie everything together succinctly.  I have a few ideas, but I'm getting stuck in my head, so they aren't transferring into actuality well.

Working bibliography

Campagna, D. S. & Poffenberger, D. L. (1988). The sexual trafficking in children: An investigation of the child sex trade. Dover, Mass.: Auburn House Pub. Co.
Finkelhor, D. & Stransky, M. (2008). Fact sheet. Crimes against Children Research Center. University of New Hampshire.

Estes, R. & Weiner, N. (2002). The commercial sexual exploitation of children in the united states. Retrieved from the GEMS Training Resources.

Ferguson, K. M., Soydan, H., Sei-Young, L., Yamanaka, A., Freer, A. S., & Bin, X. (2009). Evaluation of the CSEC Community Intervention Project (CCIP) in Five U.S. Cities.Evaluation Review, 33(6), 568-597. doi:10.1177/0193841X09346132

Howe, F. (1993). No more masks!: An anthology of twentieth-century American women poets. New York: HarperPerennial. 
Murdock, M. (1990). The Heroine's Journey. Boston, Massachusetts: Random House Inc.
Kollwitz, K. (1867-1945). German artist and activist.
Knill, P. J., Levine, E. G., & Levine, S. K. (2005). Principles and practice of expressive arts therapy: Toward a therapeutic aesthetics. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.  

Kotrla, K. (2010). Domestic minor sex trafficking in the United States. Social Work, 55(2), 181-187. doi:10.1093/sw/55.2.181

Poetry and Art by Survivors.  http://www.girlforsale.org/words/poetry/survivors/

U.S. Dept. of State. (2008). Trafficking in persons report.  Retrieved from http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/105655.pdf

U.S. Dept. of State.  (2012). Trafficking in persons report.
http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/192598.pdf

Weisberg, D. K. (1985). Children of the night: A study of adolescent prostitution. Lexington, Mass: Lexington Books.

Canvases, before.

Two multimedia recycled collaged canvases that will be the base of two original paintings.

Annnnd the following are examples of a few recently finished original works.  I foresee the paintings of this project to have some similar technical elements reminiscent of impressionism, but embody a different style.  

Abstract, finally finding its way to this page..

            Conveying the tale of sex trafficking, one of today’s particularly grim forms of injustice, falls mainly to dry reports of statistics or overly sensationalized media broadcasts.  The former form leeches the human quality from the stories and reduces the full picture to numbers.  On the other extreme, the newscasters portray the stories with such heightened emotional language that skews facts and focuses on the victimization of humans who are in actuality survivors.  Neither method of communication offers healing to the public or the individuals who have endured exploitation. 

            One major goal of expressive arts therapy is “not to eliminate suffering but to give a voice to it, to find a form in which it can be expressed” (Levine, p15).  Art has such power to transform.  Many of those who survived the holocaust and the generations who followed relied upon the arts to bring healing both personally and globally.  Rather than construct a research paper, I am interested in following a similar idea and creating a multimedia project centered on a collective of stories about trafficking collected from people I have the honor of knowing.  The project will include 2 paintings, a collection of poems and songs, a found object three dimensional art piece, and a well crafted creative nonfiction piece that ties together the other elements.