Judith Siano - The Box Opens
- nonaorbach
- Feb 21
- 7 min read
Updated: Apr 9
Found
I walked the woodland,
A lonesome man
To look for nothing-
That was my plan.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Translation: A.Z. Foreman
When I was five or six years old, our family walks had their structure: 50 minutes’ walking, then ten minutes’ rest in which I filled my pockets with “junk”: pine cones, buttons, leaves, bugs, and fragments of things people threw away and nature preserved. Sometimes, a root whose curl I liked remained firmly in the earth and wouldn’t let me pick it. I wanted to collect ants too so I could croon them, my love - in fact, I petted them to death.
At home, I turned the cones into houses, the button into a well, and the little leaves into trees in the jungle. Thus, I made myself a miniature sacred space influenced by the fairy tales and stories my mother had invented for my sister and me. The moment I learned to read, I became a bookworm, and all the stories came together. For hours on end, I would play with my treasures and create a world out of things.
One day, my mother gave me a gift, a Botanisierbüchse, a long tin box painted green with butterfly and flower stickers. Originally, botanists and other nature students used the Botanisierbüchse for rare butterflies and plants they would later examine under a microscope. From the day I got the box, I collected my treasures in it and felt truly important: I myself was a researcher. And so it continued through childhood until I grew ashamed of my hobby.
Learning
One sentence rang out through my childhood: “Judith dear, you’re dreaming again.” Often the accompaniment was a sigh, meaning that the little girl was dreaming instead of learning. In time I learned I was expected to put to sleep the urge to play and to live in my wild dream world of creative expression. Pushing down all my wildness, I continued secretly to dream. My parents My father was a lawyer who grew up in a scholarly religious home, and acquiring an education was a value of the highest priority. Additionally he was a bibliophile and compulsively would buy all kinds of books: religious works in rare editions, philosophy and history books - books old and new. Moreover, my maternal grandfather, Felix Salten, who in 1926 wrote ‘BAMBI A Life In The Woods’, left us a library of thousands of volumes.
Our library was arranged according to subjects and authors: each book had its place. Every few months, my father would test me. He’d mention some title that I would have to show him on the shelf, and explain why it was where it was (on the French history shelf, say, and not beside Oscar Wilde or the Habsburgs). It was no surprise then that our birthday presents were books inscribed “for your (whatever age) birthday from Papa.”
My mother was born in Vienna in the early 20th Century, and Heinrich Schnitzler, Gustav Klimt, and other distinguished bohemians of the time were her parents’ good friends. Art nouveau was the artistic, architectural, and decorative standard - a style rich in detail and ornament. Thus our home like many others was filled with unusual decorative objects. In locked glass cabinets, there were innumerable statuettes of humans and animals made of glass, porcelain, bronze, or wood, some outstanding and some of them kitsch, all lovingly created by better or lesser-known artists. All these objets d’art were part of my mother’s sweet childhood memories. While we children were not allowed to play with them, even from behind the glass panes they found their place in our childhood dreams.
After high school, I studied occupational therapy at the art college in Zurich: four years of intensive study from early morning till almost midnight. The college followed the Bauhaus philosophy that artistically speaking, less is more. Some of the Zurich teachers had been students of Walter Gropius, the Bauhaus founder and of its director Johannes Itten, who created the color theory that inspires me to this day.
While I was a student, a revolutionary new art style - the Scandinavian - found its way to Switzerland. Its light-colored furniture with simple lines, the airy minimalism, and the cool color scheme, were the opposite of what I was used to. All of a sudden I could use blue with green, until then taboo. I could breathe again after suffocating for years under a load of books, heavy dark furniture, and endless adornments imprisoned behind glass. For me, a young adult, this new current opened a window into a means of expression that was new and contrary to what home symbolized for me. Throughout that period and for many years afterward, the collector’s instinct was quashed and I celebrated the purity of “less is more.”
That was a good thing. In 1967, my partner and I immigrated to Israel as graduates of the Hashomer Hatzair Zionist socialist youth movement, settling in Kibbutz Magen on the border of the Gaza Strip. In our little room, there was hardly a place for individual possessions. With no private property allowed, there was simply no place for collections or other luxuries. Here, less was definitely more.
“Spontaneity has to be planned …”
Perez Hesse (1921-2008)
In the late 1960s, we left the kibbutz and moved to Haifa. There as an occupational therapist and using art therapy in a private mental health hospital, I thought I was inventing a new profession. Then, in 1980, I met Perez Hesse, artist, educator, and pioneer art therapist, who established the country’s first art therapy studio in the psychiatric department of the Rambam University Hospital in Haifa. His approach was based on phenomenology as a method of observation and analysis of processes and outcomes, as well as on therapeutic intervention techniques focused on art as a language. In addition, with young Tamar Hazut, he founded Israel’s first training program for art therapists at Haifa University (I was a student in its first course).
Two months before our studies started Perez asked me to replace him in the studio at Rambam Hospital. At the University and the Hospital, I absorbed the purity and the simplicity of the very basic means he used there. One stood before boards hanging on the wall to each of which were attached variously shaped sheets of paper. Underneath was a shelf with gouache paints, three brushes of different sizes, and a small rag, or there might be oil pastels or soft chalks. Modeling in clay was done on a steady table. Peretz coined the saying that spontaneity had to be planned. His own life was a web of contrasts: caution, planning and exemplary order alongside daring and a sense of adventure. When Perez left Israel for Paris, Tamar and I continued to develop his approach, calling it The Haifa approach. Many years later, parallel to my work at the Hospital and the University, I established an art therapy studio operating on that system.
The studio
The studio is the artist’s workroom and the space where therapy through creativity and expression takes place. I prefer a studio to a treatment room or a clinic to emphasize the central role of art in the process, with an emphasis on health rather than on illness. There is a thirst for color, clay, for objects and spontaneity rather than a world of green corridors and white coats.
Materials
Approaches to art therapy differ as to the way art materials are presented, and the need to avoid an overdose, as it were, of stimuli. The central question is whether an abundance of materials in the studio creates a sense of flooding, or whether for the digital generation inured to simultaneous stimulations and so quickly bored without them, abundant stimuli are inspiring.
The quantity of materials presented to patients differs from case to case. In treating children with attention disorders (ADHD), for instance, it may be recommended to hide some materials behind a curtain so as not to flood the child’s field of vision. By contrast, with abused clients who never in their lives had a chance to choose, presenting a wide choice of materials is good. The quantity and the chance to choose show that the treatment process can make a difference - and that life contains the possibility of choices.
Sara
Sara, who was slashing her wrists, reached the studio at the age of 16. All her worldly goods were in the bags and baskets she carried with her wherever she went. She took out one bag and spilled its contents on the floor. I stared at the pile of earth, sand, stones, weeds, broken jars, and a few liquor bottles that she probably emptied herself.
Sara asked for a box and put all these into it. She arranged the pottery fragments in a sort of path that led into the sand, over it all pouring gouache. Here was a dramatic presentation: “This is what I am today!” she declared, looking at what she’d created: “I’m lost!” To the next meeting she brought an old cage, pieces of broken glass and a rusty wheel. My immediate reaction was one of surprise, discomfort and excitement.
From the outside, here was a scene combining destruction, imprisonment, and death. Sara chose to look at it with me and say nothing; I understood that the time for interpreting the full story had not yet come and that I had to respect her pace. With that, Sara’s work brought on a flood of my own childhood feelings that now became meaningful: this is the nature of my path, in addition to all I learned formally. This is my green box reopening.
Today, there is a huge amount of junk on my studio shelves and in baskets of assorted sizes. Every material they contain, with its special qualities, is one through which the creative process can take place as it encounters the artist’s spirit and personality.
I go to the flea market a lot - it’s a paradise for the imagination - and to the fishermen’s area in Haifa Port. Then back to the studio, where I pile up my greasy, smelly treasures so that my patients/clients can turn them into something new. From attics and cellars, from street and field, from the apartment of the aunt who moved into a sheltered residence and the rooms of now grown-up children, even from my parents’ glass-fronted cabinets, the studio shelves continue to accumulate a collection of lost, rejected and found objects.
Collections in the studio. “Where others see a cluster of junk, I see a cluster of opportunity” (Louis Pont in the film “The Gleaners and I” by Agnes Varda, 2000)
This is a chapter from a book titled:
HOLY JUNK
Lost, Found and Rejected Objects in Art Therapy.
You can contact the author to purchase a copy.
Judith Siano
So rich and inspiratinal writing!
written like a good story
Amira