For people in recovery from addiction, art can be an outlet. Amanda Spencer, a certified peer support specialist at A New Horizon community recovery center in downtown Bloomington, knows this firsthand.
Spencer said she uses art to channel her emotions.
“Because sometimes it's really hard to process them and sort them out,” she said. “(With art), I can just kind of almost go into a meditative state… and it helps me to just organize the thoughts and the feelings, whether they're a little heavy ones or whether they're really light-hearted and fun ones.”
Recognizing the power of art, A New Horizon staff hosted the Art of Recovery Art Show on Thursday night, featuring a small showcase of staff and client art. Spencer said the idea came from the federal Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration [SAMHSA], which selected the same theme for 2024 National Recovery Month — taking place right now.
Expressing recovery through art
A small group gathered at the McLean County Center for Human Services-run recovery center to share in each other’s work. Shayla Woodworth, who is also a peer support specialist but isn’t employed by the Center [MCCHS], was one of them. She said she’s drawn to art because of her brother — who died from his addiction — and was considered the “artist in the family.” The two would also collaborate on art projects.
Woodworth said the provided activity — in which attendees poured paint onto tiles to create an abstract design — was a perfect metaphor for recovery.
“Because everybody’s is different,” she said. “Even if we use the same kind of paint, it's different. So kind of like recovery, we all have our own little pathways.”
For Spencer, the art tile was a way to represent suicide prevention awareness and recovery awareness through color. She married blue and purple, which are associated with suicide and recovery respectively, and added gold flecks to show “little glimmers of hope that you can change.”
Art all around at A New Horizon
Even before the art show, A New Horizon incorporated artwork into its programming. Peer Support Specialist Tim Mollet taught the “Masterpiece: An Art Club” course, which meets weekly and resumes meetings in August. Some of the art from the show was created during these sessions, including a recovery jar meant to demonstrate SAMHSA’s four major dimensions of recovery: health, home, purpose and community.
Mollet said participants wrote on rocks and placed them in the jar with “smaller stones to fill up the gaps of our recovery in life.”
“In an emergency, you're supposed to open the jar and review and see what those major dimensions of recovery are for you,” he said.
Part of Mollet’s goal as an instructor, he said, is to give people creative ways to express art with tools for recovery.
Future art projects
More art is expected at A New Horizon soon. Woodworth recently got approval to paint a mural on the south side wall of the building. She couldn’t give much detail — since that would spoil the surprise — but she said the design is very much linked to recovery.
“Whenever we go into these classes, we have, like, our core principles, we have our values and things so it does have some (of those) words, but also stuff that goes with mental health, peer support, recovery, hope,” she said, adding that it’ll hopefully “encompass everything" the community center embodies.
