First Art Kit: A Conversation with author & illustrator Boo Paterson
On the publication of her new book First Art Kit, we caught up with Boo Paterson to talk about how therapy and paper crafting can come together, why using our hands can help our brains, and how sometimes peace can be found in a paper Gramophone sitting on our bedstand.
“Hope comes from working to overcome your problems, so they no longer have a detrimental effect on your life. The first step is in identifying what’s going on — which is where I think First Art Kit can help.”
Over the past year of uncertainty, many of us have been searching for that something that works for us. We’ve had to go looking for that thing that can ground us. We’ve had to develop new strategies to contend with our anxieties and our struggles. For many of us, what we’ve found to help ourselves is Creativity.
As our world shifts and shifts again, watercolor sets have been opened, easels purchased, and sketchpads taken on daily walks. Some of us have picked up a pencil for the first time, some have returned to a lost passion long abandoned in school art class. A few have even managed to nurture a hobby into a profession.
Creativity has now staked its place firmly within the realm of mental health. We’re becoming accustomed to it being something to reach for when we’re lost, lonely or anxious. For journalist, illustrator and book sculptor Boo Paterson art has long been a cure for her soul and with her soon-to-be-released book First Art Kit we all get to benefit from her learnings.
In this book of modern creative remedies, Boo brings together common emotional and psychological ailments, from anxiety to insomnia, with paper crafting projects that have helped her navigate her life and that might help each of us in our own. With each paper trace and fold, each twist and tear, Boo takes us step by step through possible antidotes, with projects that get us into a state of flow, signpost changes in our own behaviour and give hope for whatever our situation might be.
Recently awarded the prestigious American Illustration Awards 2021, we caught up with Boo to talk about how therapy and paper crafting can come together, why using our hands can help our brains, and how sometimes peace can be found in a paper Gramophone sitting on our bedstand.
In First Art Kit, you pull together a few strands that we’re often used to seeing separately, the craft of paper-cutting, the practice of therapy, your own story and mental wellness more widely. How did you come to bring them together in this way?
I had a traumatic upbringing and consequently suffer from severe depression. A few years ago, I was going through another black-dog episode and began to think ‘you’ve had loads of therapy — why don’t you make a first aid kit for your brain from the advice you’ve had?’
Then I thought I could make things out of paper that were connected to each psychological cure as reminders for me to do the work because therapy *is* hard work!
I’ve been making things out of paper since I was a very young child and this later became what I was known for as an adult. It’s my go-to material for expressing myself. I knew almost instantly that the idea would make a cool book that could potentially help other people, and this spark of ingenuity actually lifted me out of the depression. I came up with the title and the design within the first 5 minutes: I wanted it to look like a vintage first aid kit.
The crafts in First Art Kit aren’t just papercutting, they’re all different types of paper creations; collage, book sculpture, construction, and colouring. I chose paper because it’s easily accessible to all, inexpensive, and recyclable. Also, paper is unintimidating; many people who think of themselves as ‘bad at art’ are put off by paints and other media, feeling that they have no skills and that they’ll somehow embarrass themselves. But people handle paper every day. It’s seen as something that everyone can use.
Header image: Photo Alex Robson
I love how the book normalises everyday life — the moments we feel we have low self-esteem, or experience anger, or struggle with family members for instance. It universalises our emotional and mental wellbeing. How did you choose the 25 ailments covered in the book? What’s the balance between what you’ve experienced in your own life and how you understand the experiences of others?
I’ve had 23 years of different types of therapy — and every type I’ve tried has benefited me in some way. The last treatment I had was Schema Therapy plus EMDR for trauma, which I have found to be the most useful of all, as it rewires your brain so you no longer default to problem coping strategies. It does seem to have cured my depression and PTSD.
Each chapter tackles a different problem, such as insomnia or anxiety, for example. I’d say I’ve personally dealt with about 18 of the 25 problems and I started writing about those first because, remember, the book was initially created to cure me!
I then began to think of friends’ struggles — such as hoarding or eating disorders — which I’ve never had, but have been on the periphery of. So that’s what I researched next.
The crafts themselves are therapeutic, allowing people to get into a ‘flow state’ of deep concentration. It’s a state that children are frequently in through play, but that adults hardly ever experience. It’s incredibly relaxing and allows the chatter of your brain to be switched off. Making things with your hands also gives people a sense of mastery, which is very important for self-esteem.
As my shrinks never tired of telling me, it’s normal to have a range of emotions. No one is happy all the time, and it wouldn’t be ideal if you were. For those who don’t have problematic behaviours, there is still something here for you — if you’re on a downer, you can read the advice, and relax by doing the crafts.
For those rare people with no problems at all, it can just be used as a craft book!
What’s your hope when someone picks up this book?
I hope that people who’ve never been to therapy and who have little experience of psychology can get a little insight into what the real reason for their unhappiness might be and that it leads them on a journey to find out more and even seek treatment. I also hope that people can get some light relief from doing the crafts, relaxing into the flow state, picking up new skills and learning to incorporate these into their daily life.
Photo: Alex Robson
I like how some of the projects feel like talismen almost, as reminders of some learning, others as meditative exercises, and others as ways of processing something. Some of them are funny and whimsical, others heartbreaking, or heady/conceptual. How did you connect the ailments to the projects; what purpose are you hoping they’ll serve and did that shift as you developed this book?
I wanted them to be beautiful — that’s always a given for me. And I wanted them to be linked in some way to the psychological work that people would have to do. You have to practise therapeutic cures repeatedly to make them stick. I thought if they were unusual, in whatever manner, then that would make users have a connection with the objects.
I guess the reason they came out as they did — with this range of emotions associated with them — is just how my brain works. I reckoned that if I wanted a mini-gramophone made out of paper on my mantlepiece, then probably other people would too!
You mention your own experience with therapy in the preface and you’ve mentioned elsewhere that you’ve been in therapy for 23 years. I’m curious about your relationship with therapy now. This book feels very open to the practice and brings in advice from your own sessions, so you seem therapy-curious still?
My Schema Therapy and EMDR finished in January and its effect on me has been amazing, so I don’t actually need therapy anymore. I exhibit completely different behaviours now.
My parents were alcoholics, so were emotionally absent, and I couldn’t rely on them to meet my needs. As is typical of children who never had their needs met, I continued to put myself in situations where they would not be met as an adult, because that is what is comfortable.
I was face-palming myself all during Schema Therapy, at each realisation that I was inflicting these cruelties on myself.
A good example is this: I have Raynaud’s Syndrome, so I’m always cold unless it’s about 25 degrees. But I wouldn’t switch the heating on unless it was below about 5 degrees. I would sit in the house in my coat — or sometimes two coats — and a hat and scarf, saying it was because I couldn’t afford the heating.
But keeping myself poor was also one of my problem behaviours. I felt I didn’t deserve to have financial security or warmth, or enough food; just the bare minimum, as I’d grown up with emotional deprivation.
As I was undergoing the Schema Therapy, I suddenly noticed that I was starting to turn the heating on as soon as I felt even slightly cold — it made me laugh, actually, as it was so unusual. It became automatic and over-rode the original problem behaviour. So much so that I started meeting my needs all over the place! Now I not only turn the heating on, but buy nice food, and treat myself as I treat others.
Photo: Alex Robson
Why do you think so many people are now turning to creativity as a tool to think about and manage their relationship with themselves and their lives?
Well, it’s completely enjoyable for a start. But there are also numerous studies showing how it alleviates anxiety, depression and stress. I mean, art therapy isn’t a highly skilled profession for nothing.
How do you hope First Art Kit might help in our current moment, of increased loneliness and disconnection, and our collective need to heal from the past year (and keep hopeful in the coming months)?
I think that there’s an element of kismet in First Art Kit coming out at a time of worldwide collective trauma. Many people — who could distract themselves in normal times — were left for the first time to have a good hard look that their problems and their personal situations. People realised what they did and didn’t need. Emotional needs were actually talked about in public discourse, which rarely happened before.
People who have considered the subject of mental health to be embarrassing or un-macho are now verbalising their problems.
Hope comes from working to overcome your problems, so they no longer have a detrimental effect on your life. The first step is in identifying what’s going on — which is where I think First Art Kit can help. Most people have no idea why they act the way they do.
Could you tell me a little about the process of making this book over the 6 months of the first lockdown? I was sorry to learn that you lost loved ones.
I had started writing the words in December 2019 and started conceptualizing and creating the crafts by February 2020. My aunty died around the time of the first lockdown in March, my mum in May, my uncle in August, my friend of 30 years in October and another great friend the day after my birthday in January 2021.
It was like a grenade going off in my face every couple of months. I have actually had a year like this before though: I lost six loved ones in seven months in 2016. So that experience helped somewhat, in that I knew it was normal to feel absolutely abnormal most of the time. I knew that it would take years to process, because — for me anyway — after 3 deaths you don’t have the capacity to grieve for any more people. You kind of put them on a mental back-burner and the grief for them hits you later — sometimes years later.
As for doing the book at the same time, well this is where a dysfunctional childhood really comes into its own! If it doesn’t completely break you, it makes you highly resilient; to the extent where you can cope with almost any trauma and also hold down a full-time job. You’re so used to having no one to rely on that you just get on with it. So I did.
You’ve long used art as an escape. What did that look like for you as a child and how did it help you?
Well, the ‘artist as a tortured soul’ isn’t a cliche for nothing. In childhood, as in adulthood, art allows you to funnel emotional pain out of you and onto a page, where you can process it. Sometimes it’s beautiful, sometimes it’s ugly, but it’s always meaningful.
Personally, I like to create beauty out of suffering, then I feel I’ve converted pain into something worthwhile that others can enjoy.
Photo: Alex Robson
What drew you to paper cutting in particular as a child and why does it continue to be something that you do in your life?
One of my earliest memories was watching an episode of Me and You with my mum — I was probably 3 or 4. They showed you how to make a birdcage out of paper and so I followed along and was amazed that I could make something flat into something 3D.
I also had a ‘play box’, which was a big cardboard box filled with Fairy bottles, loo-roll tubes, and scrap paper; I think we’d now call it ‘the recycling’, but we made our own fun in the 70s. Luckily, there was a plentiful supply of scrap paper as my dad was an author, as well as being a fireman, so all his manuscript pages that didn’t make the cut went into the play box.
I suppose if there had been oil paints and canvas lying around, I would have been into that.
You’ve experienced first-hand the surge in popularity of paper cutting? What do you attribute this to?
I suppose I’m partly responsible for this, as I created Papercut This Book to allow people with no artistic experience to get really nice results papercutting using templates. But aside from that, it’s the case of paper being cheap and available to all — so paper cutting is really a democratic art and craft.
Departing from the book, can you tell me a little about your book holiday course and how this came about?
I’m a book sculptor and created a 15-day e-course to let people immerse themselves in the joy of books and related arts and crafts, and like First Art Kit, its main thrust was to improve overall wellbeing.
I came up with the idea when I was incredibly stressed, and a friend told me to take a week off and do nothing but read books. I loved that idea of taking a vacation from life to be creative with books, and so Book Holiday was born. And, of course, I didn’t take a week off to read books — I got stuck in creating the course instead!
Last question, where do you go when you are lost, lonely, anxious or curious?
Books for when I’m lost, lonely or curious; either reading them or making things out of them.
I’ve been doing Transcendental Meditation for several years now, so I no longer experience anxiety.
Boo Paterson is an artist, illustrator, and journalist whose papercuts and book sculptures have been exhibited at the prestigious Royal Scottish Academy and short-listed for the World Illustration Awards twice. She is a regular cultural commentator for the BBC, and extensive coverage of her artwork has appeared in publications across the world, including the Guardian, the Week, and the Sunday Times. Boo divides her time between New York and the UK.
To learn more about Boo, visit her online.
Boo Paterson, First Art Kit: 25 Creative Papercraft Remedies for What Ails You
Published by Simon & Schuster.
Another Place
In a moment when time is stretching out, Anthony Gormley’s “Iron Men” captures the wonder of shifting lives.
What is it: An extraordinary public artwork by British sculpture Sir Antony Gormley permanently installed on Crosby Beach in the North of England. One hundred cast-iron figures stand facing the horizon across a 2-mile radius of the beach. These naked figures were cast from the artist’s own body, though are rendered in different states of serenity. Since 2005, over 650,000 people have born witness to these “Iron Men”, while Turner Contemporary in Margate now has its own companion work Another Time XXI.
Why you’ll love it: In a moment when we’re being forced to live in the details of our lives, to notice changing colors on daily walks or even the differentiations in the wallpaper of our homes, Another Place is similarly about the passage of time. The subtle and major shifts that happen with these figures within a very demarcated area, feels like those that happen within our own individual – and now collective – experiences.
Sometimes the tide obscures the figures, sometimes it reveals them. Sometimes the shifting sands submerge them, before allowing them to emerge again. Barnacles grow along their limbs, rust disrupts the surfaces. The tides, the weather, the industrial backdrop, alter what this sculpture can be at different times of the day, in different seasons, in different years. Though it looks static, these weighty presences (weighing just under a ton each), when subject to nature are not permanently the same.
What you need to know: Oddly peripatetic themselves, the sculptures were previously exhibited on coastlines in Germany, Norway, and Belgium — and never found their way to their next destination, New York. In their own movements, and now final place, Gormley brings up the complex emotions associated with emigration, the anxiety around movement, the hope that such movement might bring, and the resoluteness when we find our place.
Why we think it matters: This is art not confined to the white-walled gallery. At the mercy of nature, open to anyone, Gormley recognizes the possibility of his work to capture the imagination of everyone from art pilgrims to dog walkers, beach lovers to sandcastle-building kids. Awe and wonder are held in these forms, the spaces between them and the spaces between those on the beach with them. Of Another Place Gormley has said:
“I want to see whether it’s possible for art to be everyone’s, in the same way that the sky is and it still seems to me, that that is the most exciting challenge in art. Can you make the conditions that surround us all the time, into an arena for a kind of awareness that wouldn’t exist before, and I guess Another Place is a good example of this, where we have a beach, we have tide, we have changing conditions of weather and night and day and into that you insert these works, but adequately spaced, to allow for people to walk between them and in fact it’s the space between that is critical always in the work.”
Or in their own words — well writer Jeanette Winterson’s: “Standing modestly at their posts, the Gormley bodies are guides. They have something of ancient Earth about them — these metal men, as though they have erupted out of the iron core of the world, uncertain of human form, not smoothed by millennia of natural selection, but only now cooled from molten. They could be an older life-form pushed up, tectonically, by a shift in the Earth’s plates, or returned from a past too old to imagine, through some yawn in time.”
How to bring this into your life: Take a masterclass with the artist: choose between Zabludowicz Collection talk, BBC’s quarantine drawing class or National Saturday Club’s body sculpting exercise.
To find out more: Website
Discover more places for life
The Sketchbook Project at Brooklyn Art Library
At Brooklyn Art Library spend time with a living sketchbook museum.
“A crowd-funded sketchbook museum and community space.”
For the Lost: ‘A Lovely Wander NYC’ by Sara Boccaccini Meadows
For the Curious: ‘Come Travel with Me’ by Jill Macklem
For the Lonely: ‘somewhere across the sea’ by Michael Elizabeth Zimmerman
For the Anxious: ‘Anxiety Sucks’ by Suzie Deplonty
But you could equally be looking for ‘A story worth telling’, ‘Pocket-size memories’, or ‘Trivial retrospectives’. The floor to ceiling shelves of The Sketchbook Project at Brooklyn Art Library contain all those themes and more in thousands upon thousands of identical 5 x 7” sketchbooks. In fact, this Williamsburg storefront houses the largest collection of sketchbooks in the world: 45,000 in all (with 24,000 in its digital library). And most are made by amateurs: 30,000 different people in over 130 countries have so far contributed to this over a decade-old project. Anyone can submit a sketchbook irrespective of background, perspective and, here’s the key, ability. These drawn-out and doodled narratives can be made by a granny in Croatia, a mum in California, a child in England. Even you.
We’re a little in love with it.
This is how it works: you order one of their custom designed, Scout-made sketchbooks online and receive along with it a list of thematic prompts: recent calls included: ‘One last chance’, ‘Fearful faces’ and ‘Lamppost Limericks’. Choose one or discard them entirely. It’s up to you. You get to fill 36 pages with whatever you want—abstract squiggles, detailed portraits, maps and landscapes, diary entries, poems, fragments of images and memories, secrets and declarations of lost love—anything that can be contained within its pages (so no glitter or messy embellishments).
Here’s the genius part—your sketchbook has a barcode, so you’ll upload some details to an online catalog, like search terms and your bio. Then you’ll mail it back to The Sketchbook Project for the next part of its life: most likely it will be part of one of the traveling exhibitions which take place in a custom made Mobile Library (‘like a food truck, but instead of tacos you get sketchbooks’) that tours to schools, music festivals, art fairs, museums, and blue-chip companies, in such places as Melbourne, Chicago, Atlanta, Toronto, San Francisco, and even Rapid City, South Dakota. But your sketchbook will definitely find its permanent home on one of those shelves in that storefront in Brooklyn. All sketchbooks are cataloged and kept. There’s no jury, no judgment.
Founded in 2006 by Steven Peterman and Shane Zucker, The Sketchbook Project questions who gets to create, who gets to be good and whether that idea has any currency, and why creativity still matters. By giving people a blank page, it also gives them the impulse to make and the platform to share. This is art for everyone, and artist as anyone. As Peterman attests: “I wanted to create an informal outlet for anyone to create art, with a purpose. I believed and still believe in the notion that a creative community is stronger than its individual artists and that a project can be impactful in a way that is different than a traditional gallery.”
All these sketchbooks—made and mailed in from all over the world, collectively form a library of sorts. Visitors to the storefront, which has a very unlibrary feel—yes, there’s check-out cards, but there’s also music, art supplies and memorabilia on sale—can view any of these sketchbooks in its cozy space. Remember that barcode? That makes the in-store librarian’s job way easier: now visitors just search the catalog by theme, figure out what they want to view, and the librarian will pull it from the shelves. As the artist/maker/author you can get updates on how many times it been viewed—you can even get texts when your sketchbook-baby leaves its home on the shelves. The beauty in all this is that the person who made and then the person who viewed the sketchbooks are now in conversation; the sketchbooks forming physical testimonies of lives lived, documented and shared.
The Sketchbook Project gives analog form to some of our most basic needs, namely to tell stories and to connect. As we’re increasingly driven online to spill and share, it’s a real-world kickback. These shelves express myriad lives and ways of being in the world that you can flick through and digest over time and in physical space. It’s collectively made, with all the contributors expressing themselves very differently while working within exactly the same parameters. And it’s collectively understood; visitors can search for what they need amongst the pages or maybe even chance upon something unexpected. Plus it's permanent. These sketchbooks are designed to last, to be an archive of global creativity that endues longer than the time it takes to scroll through your feed.
(See also the workshops in the community space, on such things as bookmaking and journaling, and other interactive global art projects that aim to connect and dispel some fundament myths around creativity like the Pen Pal Exchange).
Tate Exchange
Tate Exchange is answering its own question: that art does have the potential to impact our lives.
“A place for all to play, create, reflect and question what art can mean to our everyday”
Does art have the capacity to change lives? And if it does, should it? And if it should, how can it? And if it can, where, where would this even happen?
On the fifth floor of the Blavatnik building within the cultural behemoth that has become Tate Modern, you can find an initiative that is right there, at the crux of those questions, wrestling with the how’s and why’s of art’s role in society: Tate Exchange. Here, one of the most successful arts institutions in the world is creating physical space for art to be functionally in our lives and in dialogue with society more widely. It’s also staking out this territory up North, within the walls of sister-space Tate Liverpool.
We can argue for a while that art does this anyway – that art speaks to our lives. We could even argue that this is particularly the case in the vast cultural campus that has become Tate Modern (also beloved site of my first curatorial job). Yes, there’s the beauty and solemnity of the Rothko room, the drama of the Turbine Hall, the reverie of just wandering through the permanent galleries and the inspiration-making qualities of the rotating exhibitions. Yes, you have probably experienced one work of art that has affected you without that effect being branded.
But with Tate Exchange, we get to experience that question of art’s relationship to self and society more directly, to play with Impact (that elusive idea thrown around more in tech and non-profit sectors). With Tate Exchange, the organization is confronting the very idea that art has the capacity to affect our everyday lives and to answer to, and maybe also shape, society. The lines that divide life (real time and space, the big and little questions, conversation, knowledge and experience), the arts (objects, materials, storytelling, the big and little themes) and us (as the viewer, person, consumer, maker, activator) are porous. Museums are no longer perceived or positioned as separate from society, they are located, produced by and understood within it. Similarly, as we enter these white-walled spaces, we are not a blank canvas, we’re bringing biases, backgrounds, assumptions, feelings even.
Who are we? Counterpoint Arts at Tate Exchange
ArtLab at Tate Exchange
Tate Exchange is the place where the museum gets to be something different, to morph and adapt and interact in ways that push against that traditional relationship of presentation and display. To pivot on ideas of co-learning, collaboration, production, and yes that wellbeing piece. Here Tate gets to be relational, and vulnerable. To step away from its esteemed baggage. Because maybe it’s here that the museum challenges its very reason for being—not to show, and collect, and explain works of art but to examine purpose, meaning, and relevance in the realm of the arts as they hit the pressing concerns of our modern lives. To bring to the fore questions of can we do this, and does it work, along with other questions around such things as climate change, inequality, technology, the economy, and immigration.
In its four years, two of which have been headed by socially-engaged art and placemaking advocate Caro Courage, Tate Exchange has taken a deep dive in annual thematics, headliners for life each led by an artist. Tate Exchange has explored ‘Exchange’ with Tim Etchells (2016) ‘Production’ with Clare Twomey (2017), and ‘Movement’ with Tania Brugera (2018). This year, the program is roaming across ideas of ‘Power’ with Hyphen-Labs, an international female collective who explore ideas of technology.
These themes are played out within a collaborative network of over 80 world-wide associates; cultural organizations, charities, community groups, and health trusts, who draw from the fields of art, education, mental health and community (such as ActionSpace in London and dot-art Schools in Liverpool). This wide network, in turn, shapes the form that these questions take within the spaces: anything from workshops, performances, conversations, prompt cards, reading lists, curated walks, festivals, mood and pattern workshops, reskilling sessions, seed swapping, radical myology, symposia, and even podcasting lessons. It’s all here.
Tate Exchange isn’t the easiest to explain, because it does so many things; Over the years there have been myriad perspective and platform-shaping ways that its curators, artists, practitioners, students, and associates, have found to raise their voices and engage audiences. Tate Exchange is many things to many people. But it’s all linked by a single thread: it stakes territory for the importance that culture has in our very real, every day, messy lives. It acknowledges that no one checks their lives or themselves at the door when they enter a museum. As we wander its different pathways, we inevitably feel, think, and are something, someone. Tate Exchange returns to us our place to be within museums.