Nienke Beukers is an artist and art therapist based in the Netherlands. This publication came about from her experimentation with creating stories and poems using Scrabble boards and their wooden letters. This accordion is just one of the spin-offs from this visual research and in this case it led her to create poems with the linked words on a Scrabble board, as well as presenting the words and phrases along the side of each page.
The themes underlying Beuker's choices of words and phrases all seem to reflect her therapy practice of which she states:
In my work, I like to focus on strength, vulnerability, difficult emotions, and human struggles. Beauty and ugliness, pain and happiness are some of the contrasts I find important. I enjoy playing with them because they alternate and coexist.
I use visual research to explore how people cope in these times, how they recover from emotional pain caused by overstimulation, loss, injury, or damage, and how they subsequently learn to maintain their boundaries... whether these coping strategies are used consciously or unconsciously.
The goal of this research is to inspire people to reflect on their own resilience and how to further develop it. Because resilience helps people do more than just survive. Exercising, relaxing, enduring inevitable suffering, and simultaneously enjoying it, constitutes the art I call life. [source: LinkedIn profile]
Follow this link for more about the results Beuker's Scrabble projects and testimonies from people who've engaged with it: ABOUT – Scrabble Stories
6 double-sided pages, individually 6" x 8", and when unfolded 4ft.
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