An art & sandplay therapist's creative origins - Lenore F. Steinhardt

PHILOSOPHY OF SPONTANEOUS IMAGE-MAKING WITHIN AN ENVIRONMENT

A wide sandy beach off the Atlantic Ocean was my first studio. Throughout my childhood, I played there, sculpting and drawing in the sand. I was unaware that countless generations of children before me, even centuries ago, had played on this same beach with this same sand, and created forms, mounds, tunnels and holes, that probably resembled my own. The children of my generation had limited art materials and often played simple games outdoors. There were no cellphones, television or internet media. Outdoors, in spacious empty fields, forests and beaches, wild creatures and plants lived, and natural objects such as stones, shells, leaves, flowers, grasses and branches were there to be collected and arranged into images suggested by their form, color, size, and texture. On the endless sand surface of the beach, lines in the sand transformed into sculpted mermaids. Sand mounds were more beautiful when decorated with shells, pebbles and driftwood. Deep holes were dug in search of buried treasure. Water flowed up the beach with each wave from the sea, guided through dug-out channels towards holes on drier sand above. The holes were momentarily filled, until the water ebbed back into the sea. A few hours a day of spontaneous play outdoors gave a child focus, a creative goal, a sense of accomplishment. Unconsciously, it confirmed a sense of one’s own existence, of being alive, of bonding with a local natural space that was also filled with life. The unplanned images made in nature were abandoned each day with no regret. They soon disappeared and new images replaced them.

A path from nature to art

The simple creativity of the beach environment helped form my identity as an artist. After formal training in painting and sculpting, I eventually went on to study art therapy and Jungian sandplay. In 1980, I became the first art therapist in a new therapy center for children and families near my home. As there was little guidance in art therapy at that time, I was free to invent spontaneous non-verbal, non-threatening art-based techniques in individual children. I was surprised by the unexpected images that emerged, that accurately expressed the children’s deep inner issues. In response to the need to improve communication between groups of children and between children and parents working together I created several more art-based techniques. Squiggles, scribbles, a dot or line were simple and enjoyable starting points from which images grew, developed and gradually took on the colors and forms of personal themes (Steinhardt, 2006; Steinhardt, 2017). In 1987, in a workshop called Jungian sandplay in Boston, I was again surprised to experience the power of spontaneous image-making in my own work, this time with sand and objects as a therapeutic method. The simple act of choosing and placing random objects and forming sand, and the story that emerged by itself, revived memories of my childhood beach and accessed deep emotions. I began to study Jungian sandplay. The required personal sandplay process opened a door to a forgotten past and to objects as personal and universal symbols, as well as representing their own identities, unconsciously chosen, guided by the psyche. I realized that sandplay and art therapy were very different approaches to making visual images. Art therapy can be more directive and use art materials to focus on both conscious and unconscious goals. Jungian sandplay works with objects as symbols that represent the three levels of the psyche- consciousness, the personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious and usually no guidance is given. Also, in the rectangular sand tray, meaning can be read in a universal tendency to place symbols of conscious or unconscious themes in specific locations.

Ammann (1991) divides the sand tray into quadrants, like a map with far and near areas, left and right sides and center. The location of each quadrant on this map will attract a client to place specific symbols in them. Archetypal themes are usually found on the left side of the sand tray. Personal unconscious themes may be found in the front left area, and conscious themes of present family and school or profession are placed on the right side. The front lower area usually contains themes related to the feminine. The far rear area contains themes related to aspects of the masculine. I used this theory of placement to review my paintings over many years and found that specific themes were located in specific areas, confirming that repetitive compositional solutions in a painting, although aesthetic, had common symbolic meanings guided by the psyche (Jung, 2014).

Environmental Art and Land Art: On-site natural materials for making art in nature

The beach I played on as a child had probably existed for centuries before me. Children of local native tribes must have played there, just as I had, with the same unconscious urge to gather sand into mounds, dig holes and tunnels or sculpt the sand and decorate the work with pebbles, shells and other objects from the sea. Beach sand forms made by children in play was not considered art.

My creative process developed in art school through formal study of drawing, painting and sculpture, making art that was permanent, using quality commercial art supplies. In the 1960’s, museums defined the value of art, and gallery dealers sold art and artists to investors, turning art into a commercial commodity. At the same time, in the 1960s, many powerful industries exploited natural environments for wood, minerals, and commercialized food production by spraying chemicals to prevent damage by insects. Chemical waste from factories polluted and poisoned the habitats of indigenous plants and animals in water and on earth. The survival of whole environments and their beauty was threatened. The commercialization of art and the destruction of nature awakened concern in groups of artists. A movement known as “Land Art” or “Environmental Art” began. Artists left the studio and began making art directly on site in nature with the raw materials of each environment. “Site-specific” Art introduced a new non-commercial category of art that was free, open to everyone, to make and to view. Andy Goldsworthy was inspired to use nature’s materials in forests and fields to construct stone, wood and leaf structures (Goldsworthy, 1990). Richard Long walked through natural environments in different countries rearranging the natural materials and their forms that he found along the path (Long, 2008). The finished works of Goldsworthy, Long, and others, made of natural found materials and left on site, would eventually disintegrate. But they could be preserved in photographs that were later published in books, focusing attention on appreciation of nature and its beauty. Land Art also inspired creation of permanent monumental on-site artworks connected to a specific landscape that took years to construct and even today remain in process. James Turrell, a Light and Land artist has worked on his “Roden Crater” in the northern Arizona desert for 45 years (Turrell, 2023). Michael Heizer began his work on “City” in the Nevada desert in the early 1970’s and continues to develop this work today (2022, https://www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/15831-michael-heizers-sprawling-land-art-piece-called-city-opens-today-in-nevadas-high-desert). The creative connection to nature on beaches, forests, and fields and on snowy mountains, continues as artists draw or construct large designs on site and photograph their work. Environmental Art Festivals are also held in natural settings and attract large groups of non-artists, who “re-arrange” on-site materials into sand sculptures, balanced rock assemblages and leaf, flower and branch assemblages. They often photograph their work and post photos on Instagram and Facebook, encouraging awareness of the joy and beauty of making art in nature, the need to protect environments, and the life forms they support.

The site-specific sandplay setting, its materials, and non-verbal image-making in therapy

Natural materials such as stones, glass, shards, bones, nuts, and dried plants are collected by art therapists and sandplay therapists for creative use in their clinics. In art therapy they may be painted or glued to an artwork, used as a concrete natural material. In Jungian sandplay, the use of all objects, manufactured and natural, is symbolic.

The sandplay setting contains two sand trays of specific proportions, filled to half with sea sand, one wet and the other dry, painted blue inside. A large collection of miniature objects on shelves and in containers symbolize everything in the world and in imagination. In sandplay, the use of any object as a symbol, can represent natural life cycles of birth, growth, death and rebirth, and any personal theme of some type of wounding or of healing.

Objects from any country or culture in the world, or natural objects, are freely chosen and placed in the sand tray, representing personal issues but also symbolizing a kind of universal consciousness (Kalff, 2020).

After the client has finished the sandplay and observed it, he or she leaves the session with an internal image of the completed work. Later, the therapist photographs the sand picture and returns all the miniatures and natural objects to their containers, for ongoing use by any client in another sandplay. The sand picture is site-specific, dependent on the environment, will not be the same in any other setting, similar to the use of on-site materials in Environmental Art.

Writing about creative sandplay and our inherited human urges to make art

My inner identity as a visual artist has supported my therapeutic understanding of the stages of the sandplay process, and of the symbolic universal meanings of sand forms. I researched several symbols that attracted my curiosity, such as a fisherman miniature, sea shells in ancient cultures and in the sand tray, the use of different types of masks in sandplay. Writing about these symbols expanded my understanding of their use in sandplay and their relation to universal and ancient human needs to create art as a visual symbol (Steinhardt, 2009; 2010; 2014; 2023). I have written three books about various aspects of making sandplays, sculpting sand, the importance of the color blue as the inner surface of the sand tray, the therapist’s role, and the connection of the sandplay journey to the mythological “hero’s journey, and to our journeys and quests in real life (Steinhardt, 2000; 2012; 2023; 2025). Sandplay’s connection to nature, to the invisible spiritual powers that affect our creative symbolic work with sand and miniatures, has always been a central focus, for myself as an artist, and for my clients as they rebuild a stronger psychic structure and regain natural balance on their sandplay journeys.  Sandplay supports the developmental and emotional goals of boys and girls who have different symbols and needs. Sandplay also reflects the deep unconscious knowledge of life relationships and processes of individuation that have been told for centuries in Greek myths, and the myths of many cultures (Graves, 1955/1960).

     A natural inclination to create visual art carried me on my journey from beach sandplay to art, art therapy and sandplay therapy. These professions deepened my interest into the sources of the human urge to make marks and build structures since the dawn of humanity, to study of archaic art and sculpture, of ancient monumental temples, and the pilgrimages and quests that we make in real life to power spots around the world. Sandplay itself is an inner quest. The site-specific environment of the sandplay setting is a small and limited space, but it is also an endless inner space within a sense of endless time while a client works. The founder of sandplay, Dora Kalff, was a Jungian analyst, and a Buddhist. The principles of holding the work in silence, of non-intervention, of the flow of the “underground river” of the unconscious and the power of the co-transference, all connect therapist and client during the work. The therapist’s inner work and understanding will reverberate in the client’s psyche, just as the client’s wounds will reverberate in the therapist’s psyche, so that simultaneously, both client and therapist are being healed. The visual symbolic sandplay image holds and reveals the stages of the journey.

References

Ammann, R. (1991) Healing and transformation in sandplay; creative processes become visible. LaSalle: Open Court.

Goldsworthy, A. (1990) A Collaboration with Nature. New York: Harry N Abrams Inc.

Graves, R. (1955/1960) The Greek Myths. London: Penguin Books

Heizer, M.(2022)  https://www.architecturalrecord.com/articles/15831-michael-heizers-sprawling-land-art-piece-called-city-opens-today-in-nevadas-high-desert).

Jung, C.G. (2014) CW9, Collected Works of C.G. Jung, Volume 9 (Part 1): Archetypes and the collective Unconscious. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press.

Kalff, D. M. (2020) Sandplay, a psychotherapeutic approach to the psyche. (translated by Boris L. Matthews). Oberlin, Ohio: Analytical Psychology Press.

Long, R. (2008) Richard Long: Walking and Marking. National Galleries of Scotland.

Steinhardt, L. (2000) Foundation and form in Jungian Sandplay. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

Steinhardt, L. (2006) Eight Frame Squiggle. Art Therapy, Journal of the American Art Therapy Association.

Steinhardt, L. (2009). Following the Fisherman Image in Sandplay Therapy. Journal of Sandplay Therapy, Volume 18, Number 1, 2009, pp. 7-16

Steinhardt, L. (2010) The symbolism of seashells in sandplay therapy and ancestral veneration of shells in rites of fertility, birth, burial, and renewal. Journal of Sandplay Therapy, Volume 19, Number 1, pp. 90-109.

Steinhardt, L. (2012) On Becoming a Jungian Sandplay Therapist; The healing spirit of Sandplay in nature and in therapy. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers.

Steinhardt, L. (2014) Three forms of masks in sandplay therapy: Miniatures wearing masks, mask objects, sculpted sand masks. Journal of Sandplay Therapy, Volume 23, Number 1.

Steinhardt, L. (2017) From dot to line to plane: constellating unconscious imagery in art therapy. Art Therapy: Journal of the American Art Therapy Association. 

Steinhardt, L. (2023) The color blue: its physiological and psychological impact as the inner surface of the sand tray in Jungian sandplay. Journal of Sandplay Therapy, 32, 2, 37-57. 

Steinhardt, L. (2025) Sandplay: the image speaks for itself; Signposts, symbols and themes on the path of the sandplay journey. London: Jessica Kinglsey Publishers. 

Turrell, J. (2023) James Turrell: A Retrospective. Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

LENORE F STEINHARDT, MA, ATR, CST-T

lenore.steinhardt@gmail.com