The Invisible Boxes

From Listening to Matter

Hands shape containers of emotions, stories, thoughts, performing a sort of “material transformation” of what is not matter.

Shapes, signs, and colors make visible the experiences that invisible containers hold within us.

There is a memory box in each of us that collects precious memories, images, dreams, and desires from that imaginary place we call childhood.

There are dark and rigid boxes like cages, labyrinths, and prisons that hold our vital energies hostage.

Others, open and communicating, are active laboratories in a fertile becoming that thinks and builds our stories.

The artist Gianna Albertin draws from an inner reservoir built within herself over the course of her long experience as a psychotherapist.

The development of a container or mental space, a long and necessary process, is the tool the therapist uses to give welcome, form, name, and thus bearability to emotions and inner experiences that would originally seem to lack boundaries, limits, and meaning.

It is a patient and creative work, of listening and elaboration, of welcoming and giving back.

Thought and creativity are still the tools that guide her hands today: the artist meets the formless matter to extract a visible form and to communicate, transfiguring a sense of lived experiences.