Dr Carla van Laar Creative Arts Therapy

11/02/2026

Creative Arts Therapies Events chose this snippet from my presentation on Sunday at the World Art Therapy Conference to share...

Sometimes the gold in these conversations happens after all the planned content has been presented and then we have a candid exchange!

That is exactly what happened here with Carmen and I having a spontaneous discussion that flowed on from my presentation. I always enjoy these stimulating conversations - thanks for sharing!

And yes - let's get clear about theory and evidence, let's stop bending over backwards trying to explain everything through neuroscience, and let's start valuing the evidence we have.

Engagement, participation, focus, people's own words, artefacts and whether they keep showing up. Excellent evidence.

11/02/2026

Supervision Studio SUMMER SERIES

The third workshop is coming up this Sunday and I'm looking forward to sharing this creative, reflective small group space with my colleagues.

Through art-making, embodied awareness, image and reflective dialogue, we’ve been working with the three core layers of the Expressive Therapies Continuum, strengthening our capacity to work safely, creatively and ethically with the people we accompany.

Session 3: Storying & Meaning – The Cognitive–Symbolic Layer

In this final session, experience becomes image, metaphor and narrative.

We explore how story and symbol support integration, identity and continuity — and how creative meaning-making strengthens agency, coherence and hope in therapeutic practice.

This is where the layers come together, and lived experience finds its voice in image and story.

This Sunday's session is fully booked -
but don't worry!

Supervision Studio continues to run every second Sunday.

While there is regular a pool of practitioners who join the Supervision Studio, there is absolutely no pressure on you to attend every fortnight, month or anything else.

The Supervision Studio is here when you need it, and you are always welcome to join. You will see familiar faces and meet new people each time you attend. Each session is a stand alone session, so you can access support at times that suit you.

New members are always welcome.

Would you like to join?

Please email me at carla@carlavanlaar.com and I will set you up as a supervisee so you can book yourself in.

08/02/2026

“Bridge building” is emerging as a core theme in Creative Health — and it’s exactly the shift our field needs right now.

I’ve been following the Arts & Health Initiative in California with real interest because it names something that can be a source of invisible tension if it remains unexpressed: that both creative arts therapies and community arts approaches belong within a shared frame of arts in health - or Creative Health.

Their Vision 2030 Plan speaks not only to clinical settings where licensed creative arts therapists support people with specific needs, but also to the community-centered practices that have been contributing to wellbeing for generations — led by artists, culture bearers, creative workers, and cultural practitioners.

What’s powerful here is the bridge:

✨ Mental health expertise (e.g. all of the Creative and Experiential Therapies)

AND

✨ Community creative participation (e.g., music-making for connection, community writing for expression, culturally grounded arts practice as care).

Both are health-enhancing pathways. Both shape resilience, connection, identity, emotional fluency, and meaning. And both are increasingly being recognised as part of a social determinants of health framework — where arts participation is placed alongside other preventive health behaviours that support equitable wellbeing.

This isn’t “arts plus health.”
This is arts as health — in its breadth, depth, and diversity.

The Arts & Health Initiative’s webinar series is an intentional way of opening dialogue across sectors without flattening differences. It names:

* shared values
* distinct approaches
* and practical opportunities for collaboration.

— across healthcare, community arts, cultural policy, and lived experience.

In my own work, I see this bridge every day:

* in creative arts therapy that attends to individual embodiment and relational attunement,
* and in community arts that invite collective expression, belonging, and everyday creativity.

If we are to meaningfully integrate creativity into how societies support wellbeing — not as 'complementary' but as FOUNDATIONAL — these bridge-building conversations matter.

Have a look at all these wonderful, bridge-building resources from the Arts & Health Initiative in California:
https://www.caforthearts.org/arts-health-initiative



Image: one of the closing slides from my presentation at the World Art Therapy Conference yesterday. "A rainbow bridge to the new horizon". Photographed on BoonWurrung Country, Inverloch, Australia.

08/02/2026

TIME ZONES
WORLD ART THERAPY CONFERENCE

Are you interested in viewing / participating in my “I Just Feel Happier!” presentation today?

I’m happy to know you’ll be tuning in 😊💖🙏 I think we all find it confusing and I also know the organizers try really hard to make it a truly global event and make it accessible. Still, it is challenging to figure out the timings!

I’m scheduled on TODAY at 1.45am EST which my time converter tells me is:
5.45pm AEDT (Vic / NSW / Tas times).
This will be:
4.45pm QLD time
5.15pm SA time
2.45pm WA time
4.15pm NT time.

I hope I’ve calculated all these correctly!

I’d love to hear from you afterwards with anything you’d like to share about what catches your interest, sparks your imagination, or touches your heart.

😊🥰😘

Here’s my link again so you can register to join for FREE

OR if you’ve got something else on this weekend, you can use my link to get a discount to watch it later,

😊🌱💗

Here’s the link:

05/02/2026

Who’s excited about this weekend “World Art Therapy” event?

I am!

Starting this weekend, with the “Mind/Body” theme.

We have an awesome contingent of Australian Facilitators presenting.

I’m humbled to be along side my Elders:

Marianne Wobcke : Midwife of Creative Transformational Practice

AND

Cornelia Elbrecht :
International Leader in Sensorimotor Art Therapy

I love these women sooooo much.

Here’s my link again so you can register to join for FREE

OR if you’ve got something else on this weekend, you can use my link to get a discount to watch it later,

😊🌱💗

Here’s the link:

https://www.artstherapies.org/link/RyQNXj/VANLAAR15?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.artstherapies.org%2Fcourse%2Fworld-art-therapy-conference-2026

03/02/2026

Thanks PACFA! I’m proud to be Convenor of CCET, working alongside my incredible colleagues in the CCET Leadership Group: Deputy Convenor Tara Harriden, CPD Coordinator Sandy Buchanan, CCET Networking Coordinator Cody Fisher, CCET Website and Gallery Coordinator Alana Stuart, and our other CCET LG members Janine Cameron, Diana Sands and Fiona Hocking who all contribute in various ways to help support the CPD program, bring vibrancy to our CCET Online Community, promote our work through publications, and sit on the CCET membership application panel. There are many hands that go into making CCET such a welcoming community of practice for our members. We look forward to connecting even more regularly with our CCET members this year, and to welcome new members as we continue to grow and learn and thrive together in 2026.

💡This week, PACFA is shining the light on our colleges and their 2025 success

The PACFA College of Creative and Experiential Therapies (CCET) had a significant year of growth and influence in 2025, contributing to national policy reform, strengthening professional frameworks, and supporting the visibility of creative and experiential therapies across Australia’s mental health and wellbeing sectors.

More info here: https://www.pacfa.org.au/portal/News-and-Advocacy/news/2025/December/ccet-2025-updates.aspx?utm_source=enews&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Pacfa%20enews

01/02/2026

Hi folks! Are you in need of a Creative Wellbeing Day Out…

I’ve organised a chartered bus and I’m inviting you to be part of a small group to step out of Melbourne for a single day by the sea and spend time within the rhythm of the Inverloch Equinox Festival — no accommodation, no driving, no rushing home.

The day includes:

🚌 return bus travel from Melbourne

💗 time at the Wellbeing Expo

🖼️ an afternoon Open Studio gathering at my place

🌊 beach time

🎶 and a free evening music festival at The Glade.

To make this accessible, your $75 ticket covers your chartered small bus transport — Melbourne return, plus local transfers during the day. Everything else is either free or low-cost, and food and drinks are available at the festival. This is a low fuss, great value, fun and nurturing, creative day out.

Details are on the attached fliers.

I’m organising this voluntarily and I’m not taking a cut out of your ticket, it all goes to Cruisin' with Kylie, your tour guide and bus driver. I’ll meet you at my place for the Open Studio and come along to picnic and dance at the music festival.

It’s an 11-seater bus, so places are limited and will be first in, first served.

Looking forward to seeing you here if you can make it!

Please email me to book your seat in the bus and invite your friends and/or family to come along. All welcome.

😊 Carla

It’s on Saturday 21st March and here is the link to the whole festival program:

https://www.inverlochequinoxfestival.com.au/whats-on

30/01/2026

“I just feel happier.”

That’s how one participant described their experience at the end of a year-long collaboration that unfolded through ocean time, movement, shared art-making, and community connection.

Alongside interviews, psychometric measures, and arts-based evidence, this simple statement came to hold the essence of the work — not as a reduction of complexity, but as an integration of it.

At the World Art Therapy Conference, I’ll be presenting this work as an invitation to reflect together on some deeper questions our field continues to grapple with:

How did we come to inherit the mind/body split — as if body, mind, emotion, land, community, and spirit were ever separate?

What happens when creative and experiential practice is situated within everyday community life, rather than confined to contained settings?

And what becomes possible when care is shaped in partnership with place, relationship, and lived experience?

This inquiry is especially significant in work with veterans, where training often requires an intensified override of bodily sensation and emotional response. Re-entering relational, emotional, and embodied life can therefore be complex — and deeply important.

The work I’ll be presenting explores how creative practice can support reintegration in holistic ways — not as a set of techniques, but as a lived, relational way of being in the world.

If these questions resonate with you — if you’re curious about where creative and experiential therapies are heading, and how they might be woven more fully into community life — I warmly invite you to join me.

I’ll be presenting at the World Art Therapy Conference on Sunday 8 February, 6:05–7:25pm AEDT (Melbourne / Sydney time).

There is also a second screening on Monday 9 February, 6:05–7:25am AEDT.

Here’s my personal link you can use to register for free, or to receive my discount rate if you purchase one of the paid options:

https://www.artstherapies.org/link/RyQNXj/VANLAAR15?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.artstherapies.org%2Fcourse%2Fworld-art-therapy-conference-2026

30/01/2026

Creative Health — a globally growing field of wellbeing — is challenging medical models of health.

And it’s also challenging all of us… even Creative Arts Therapists like myself, who already work at the edges of the allied health system.

How is it challenging us?

It asks us to imagine beyond clinical models.
Beyond narrow units of service as the ultimate expression of care.
Beyond siloed interventions that address only fragments of a person.

Creative Health invites us into collective care, collaboration, and community-based approaches — where creativity, relationship, place, and participation are central to wellbeing.

This question continues to guide my work:

"How can mind–body approaches be thoughtfully adapted to honour a specific community and the context they live in — supporting genuine health and wellbeing?"

One example is a 12-month community program on Boon Wurrung Country, in the coastal town of Inverloch, designed to support the wellbeing of veterans aged 60–85.

Co-designed through dialogue with the veterans themselves, the program integrated ocean immersion, mindful movement, and creative arts practice. Alongside surf coach Shane Hogan, I co-facilitated experiences that included surfing, snorkelling, and stand-up paddleboarding, woven together with reflective artmaking, blue-space imagination, and embodied creative processes.

Facilitation was carefully scaffolded to build trust and support emotional safety, while inviting playful role expansion — gently re-authoring stories around age, ability, and gender for both participants and facilitators.

Participants reported renewed confidence, connection, belonging, and joy, alongside an average 18% reduction in distress. The program was evaluated using a mixed-methods approach to support future funding and translation into other community contexts.

In my presentation at February's FREE World Art Therapy Conference, I share how combining nature-based environments, mindful presence, and creative arts practices can foster reconnection and wellbeing when they are shaped by place, culture, and community.

Participants are also invited to experience several of the creative processes themselves — gaining an embodied, lived understanding of the methods being discussed.

This work continues to remind me that creativity, held relationally and contextually, offers more than individual support — it helps us imagine new ecosystems of care.

Find out more and register for this wonderful FREE event here - and if you want to access the presentations ongoingly after the live event, you can purchase the paid package and receive my personal discount at this link too:

https://www.artstherapies.org/link/RyQNXj/VANLAAR15?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.artstherapies.org%2Fcourse%2Fworld-art-therapy-conference-2026

29/01/2026

This year's Inverloch Equinox Festival is going to be wonderful, and I'm excited to be part of it, with my Open Studio and Artist's Talk about "Creativity as a Wellspring".

"Local artist Dr Carla van Laar warmly invites you to her Open Studio from 1–3pm on Saturday 21 March, as part of the Inverloch Equinox Festival.

Set in her beautiful, tranquil garden studio, this experience offers an opportunity to wander through the calming space where Carla creates, reflects and brings her artwork to life. Enjoy bubbles and a chat on arrival, an artist talk at 1:20pm on Creative Process as a Wellspring and a guided wander through her studio, garden and home.

PLUS original artworks will be available to purchase at 30% off. It’s an afternoon designed to slow you down, spark inspiration and celebrate renewal through creativity.

Make a day of it with the Wellbeing Expo in the morning and free live music at The Glade from 4pm.

📞 Bookings: TEXT Carla 0410 403 270"

Follow this link for all the details:

https://www.inverlochequinoxfestival.com.au/whats-on/open-art-studio-with-dr-carla-van-laar

29/01/2026

☀️ SUPERVISION STUDIO — SUMMER SERIES | SESSION 2
This Sunday 1st Feb 2026

💗 Getting to the Heart
of the Expressive Therapies Continuum:
Depth, Distance & Feeling

This session moves us into the perceptual–affective layer of the Expressive Therapies Continuum — the place where feeling and perception meet.
After slowing into the kinesthetic–sensory layer in our previous gathering, we now turn toward the space where external conditions and internal states combine to create feelings.
In this layer, experience begins to become visible through:

• depth and perspective
• proximity and distance
• intensity and contrast
• overlap, tone, and hue
Here, questions of safety and danger are often negotiated visually — before they are named in words.
How close is too close?
How much distance allows feeling without overwhelm?
What creates containment, and what signals risk?
Through visual and emotional exploration, we work with aesthetic distance as a living, relational process — noticing how form, colour, space, and composition can hold big feelings as safe risks - meaningful, and alive.
This session offers space to:

• explore emotional depth through visual perception
• notice how feeling is shaped by distance, contrast, and form
• stay with affect without rushing toward meaning
• experience being felt and understood through creative response.

💕 This is the layer of the heart — where emotion is present, visible, and held within relationship.

As always, Supervision Studio invites you to slow down, make art, and reflect with peers — reconnecting with your own creative intelligence as a practitioner, while meeting PACFA supervision requirements in a way that truly fits creative and experiential practice.

🌀 Session 2: Depth, Distance & Feeling
🗓 Sunday 1 February
🕙 10.00–12.30 AEDT
💻 Online small-group Supervision Studio
📜 PACFA-aligned supervision hours

✨ Only two places still available.
Each session stands alone — you’re very welcome to join even if you didn’t attend Session 1.

🌱 A friendly reminder…

You can use the 12‑month Creative Supervision Package to book Supervision Studio sessions across the year — including the Summer Series.

The package includes 12.5 hours of supervision (1:1 + Studio), valid for 12 months, and is currently offered at $990 — excellent value for PACFA‑aligned, creative supervision that works with more‑than‑verbal ways of knowing.

Several practitioners have already stepped into this container, and it’s been lovely to feel the continuity beginning to form.

If this session speaks to how you work — through emotion, relationship, art and attunement — I’d love to welcome you into the Studio.

👉 Book via Book Now → Professional Supervision → Supervision Studio (if you have not booked using my system before please email me as I will need to set you up)
🌐 https://carlavanlaar.com/supervision/
📧 carla@carlavanlaar.com

*Please note, as a PACFA Accredited Supervisor, my supervision is recognised as counting towards your annual supervision hours by PACFA, ACA and ANZACATA, and I welcome members of all these associations.
Creative supervision that speaks your language 🌿