What does death mean today? In some cultures, it’s still a communal rite of passage. In others, it’s been tucked away into hospital rooms, crematoria, and digital tributes. We’ve made it silent, hygienic, private. But no matter how much we try to avoid it, death is here. And it’s talking to us.
Across the world, human beings have always needed to make sense of loss.
In Bali, families celebrate Ngaben, a joyous cremation ritual believed to release the soul. In Ghana, elaborate fantasy coffins reflect the life or dream of the deceased. In Mexico, Día de los Muertos invites the dead home with food and music. In Japan, people return yearly to ancestral tombs with offerings. In many Western cultures, death is often hidden behind euphemisms, restrained by protocol, and marked with quiet restraint.
Art therapy enters this fragmented landscape not as a replacement for ritual, but as a way to rediscover it. It allows people, no matter where they come from, to reconnect with the dead through image, gesture, material, and imagination.
As explored in the french journal “¿ Interrogations ?“, we are rethinking what counts as real, what counts as presence. A photo. A lock of hair. A shared song. These things are more than things. They hold emotional agency. They carry grief and love, and sometimes, they even carry the feeling that someone is still here.
From Absence to Presence: Making the Invisible Tangible with Art Therapy
In art therapy, these objects become tools. When someone paints the landscape of a last memory or sculpts the feeling of absence, they are building a bridge between the visible and invisible. They are not just expressing; they’re communicating. For some, it might be the only way to continue a conversation with someone who is gone.
In my work as an art therapist, I’ve seen children create altars for their pets, adults paint their ancestors into dreamscapes, elders sculpt the shape of their mourning. These gestures, often humble, bypass intellectual barriers. They do what words can’t: they make the intangible real. As Potash et al. (2014) show, this kind of expression doesn’t just soothe grief, it actively rebuilds meaning.
Different societies manage this in very different ways. In collectivist cultures, grief is shared, sung, danced, embodied. In individualist ones, people often feel alone in their mourning. Art therapy creates a space that belongs to the person but connects to something beyond them. It doesn’t impose a belief in spirits, but it respects that the dead are not always gone for those who loved them.
Grief became a product
The line between material and immaterial is not fixed. Spirits, memories, and emotions can live in objects. Our relationships with these objects can be as alive as any dialogue. In this sense, spirit art and art therapy are not fringe practices. They’re part of a long tradition of humans needing to give form to what they feel.
Of course, there are risks. As Trompette (2008) points out, death is increasingly commercialized. Grief becomes a product. Mourning becomes a package. But art therapy resists this. It doesn’t sell closure. It invites exploration. It honors confusion, vulnerability, and the possibility that healing doesn’t mean forgetting.
In short, art therapy helps people mourn in their own language, whether spoken or not. It offers tools to remember, to reconnect, or simply to feel. It respects that death is both universal and deeply personal.
Whether through a drawing, a collage, or a ritual made up on the spot, it gives people something to hold onto when everything else feels lost. And in that gesture, small or grand, something extraordinary happens: we feel the dead with us, not in a ghostly sense, but in a human one.
More than a therapeutic tool, art becomes a language of presence. It does not aim to replace medical or psychological support but offers an experiential dimension often missing from standard approaches. It allows individuals to give meaning to loss through acts of creation, to reconstruct identities torn apart by grief, and to invite dialogue where silence dominates. In many cases, it also repositions the deceased not only as memories but as parts of a continuing narrative. Through metaphors, symbols, and process-oriented creation, art therapy helps mourners traverse the abyss between life and death while reclaiming agency over their own emotional journey.
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References:
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