The Art of Recovery

The image is riddled with chaos, as swirls and jagged lines spread throughout the page. Framed in the disarray, is a girl standing before a burst of hot pink color, surrounded by flowers. It appears to be the warm, bubblegum center of a troubled space, but a step closer reveals that the flowers contain junk food and the girl is bound and blindfolded with her mouth stretched open. For some, this contrast between childlike sweetness and paralyzing helplessness can be unsettling. However, for a patient addicted to binging and purging, it's a way to articulate a disorder that our culture is still learning to interpret.

The name of the piece was "Sweet Lie Trap" and it was one of the 23 pieces that were exhibited at Chestnut Hill College on Friday, as part of The Renfrew Center Foundation's traveling art show titled The Art of Recovery. The Renfrew Center, based in Philadelphia, is the nation's first residential eating disorder facility, established in 1985. Its non-profit arm, The Renfrew Center Foundation, sponsors the art show each spring, its pieces created by women during varied stages of recovery at the facility. The images range from the disturbingly bleak to the optimistic, but what the exhibit provides as a whole is an in depth view behind the tabloids, the numbers, and the debates, into the complex journey one must face when battling an eating disorder.

"I hadn't been using my words. That was a big thing for me, using the behaviors to let people know how I was feeling," said Jenna Bass, who was one of the featured artists, and was a patient at Renfrew in 2009 and again in 2010. Her piece was titled "Mercy of the Fallen" and was the third piece of a larger series called "Redhead of the Sea." She said that growing up, her family, while very close, never discussed topics or emotions that were perceived as ugly. In her painting, a redheaded girl, with a stomach distended from concealed emotions, forces her message from her lips, in the form of bluebirds. However, the bluebirds cry music notes in a scattered formation and without a listener to hear and interpret them, they plummet to a pile on the ground.

Sondra Rosenberg, the art therapist of The Renfrew Center, said that eating disorders are a kind of "coded message" and often an unconscious form of communication. Using art as a tool for self-expression, patients can find a more positive outlet to unveil whatever memories, fears, or insecurities, they may be concealing. For example, Rosenberg said that one of the prompts she uses is to encourage the women to look into what they're really hungry for when they reach for food. "When somebody is binging, they're obviously not trying to satisfy physical hunger cues, they're using the food to satisfy a kind of emotional hunger," said Rosenberg. In one of the results, the artist drew a head, its eyes closed, bodiless and suspended, and inside its mouth is a heart. "For her, it's very much about being hungry for love, for comfort, for all of those things that she was using food to try and get," said Rosenberg.

Another featured artist, Julie Harris, said that while she paints and teaches studio art, her time at Renfrew a year and a half ago was her first experience using her artwork to help toward recovery. In fact, the night contained many firsts for Harris. "Normally, I speak about my art more as a teaching tool, or lecture about it in a certain way so that there's a space between me and it," she said. However, during Friday's presentation of her piece "Pulse Memories" she said she could speak about the work more in "recovery mode." The piece, which combines a mixture of collage, layering and pastels, in intense black and blood red, portrays anatomical imagery, such as a skeleton torso with an ambiguous face. This was also the first time Harris chose to use color in her work. "I just felt like I needed color to symbolize what was going on… I always like the power of black and white, and that contrast, but the red just…I just felt like it needed that pain," she said.

The greatest significance of The Art of Recovery and art therapy at Renfrew is that this work does not end with the exhibit. For Bass, who continues to post work for Modern Day Dorothy Designs, art therapy has helped her regain independence and get through difficult periods without fully relying on others. It also gave her a way to connect with her father. She said, "I believe it was last year, we had an exhibit…and he came with me...and on the way home he leaned over, and he looks at me and goes, 'That's something really terrible and painful to go through.' It was the first acknowledgement that he was starting to understand." As eating disorders can be isolating, she said that she hopes her work can break through the secrecy and can lead to more similar connections.

For artist Julie Harris, the gradual change within her work is telling of her personal and emotional transitions. She laughed about how she could not create "positive" imagery in treatment, but said that, as she has grown more confident with color and has moved toward silkscreen, her work is becoming more "decorative." This is particularly evident in her series "Little Sparrow" which still uses anatomical imagery and some darker collage pieces but contains more movement and softer colors than "Pulse Memories."

The art exhibit grows each year, as more women learn to channel their harmful behavior through a more constructive source, and will continue to travel to new venues, educating viewers about the disorder. "When you're trying to overcome an eating disorder, oftentimes people have a reaction of, 'What's the problem? Just eat,'" said Rosenberg. "I think this gets underneath in a way that people can understand, or even relate to." As this exhibit leaves lasting impressions on viewers, with imagery that is both deeply haunting and highly inspiring, it more than achieves this purpose.