What is Clay Art Therapy?

If you’ve ever pushed your hands into a piece of wet clay, you’ll likely have a sense of the therapeutic properties of the material. The physicality of clay, and its vast potential for creativity, have attracted artists, artisans, and amateurs for centuries. Those practitioners have long lauded the therapeutic and meditative benefits of creating ceramics — and today, it’s a proven method for art therapy.

Art therapists have often intuited that introducing clay in art therapy sessions capitalizes on the unique characteristics of this tactile, highly sensory medium. There are a variety of somatosensory qualities of clay. One of them is the leading experiences of touch and physicality. Because clay is a three-dimensional material, there are also specific perceptual and decision-making responses that involve the complex coordination of different cortical regions of the brain.

Above is a mind map that I did from the topic of clay art therapy. Firstly, clay art therapy aims to improve self-esteem, provide self-discovery, the release of emotion, and stress relief. Next, there are three major therapeutic features of clay work, which is procedural expressions through the experience of touch, movement, and the three-dimensional aspect of clay-work, construction and deconstruction processes through clay work, and the regression process. Furthermore, instead of brushes for painting and pencils for drawing, we use our hands for clay. Tactile contact — the first form of communication we learn as infants — is a very primal mode of expression. A longtime user of clay said, “I like the feel and dirtiness of the medium. It makes it feel more like my own work, like more of me is reflected in the clay.”