Our latest Spotlight on projects and people within the Graphic Medicine international community focuses on Amy Bell, a comic artist who recently completed a thesis on autobiographical cartooning from an art therapist perspective.
About the Artist
Cartooning is Amy’s preferred approach for making meaning and transforming confusing or negative emotions. In 2014 she began to draw Daisy, an autobiographical cartoon alter-ego born from the need to navigate significant life events. An article published in JoCat discusses this in more detail. In contrast to the simple cartoons, Amy also draws intricate mermaids using stippling for emotional regulation.
Amy has recently completed an MRes thesis from a heuristic inquiry exploring the healing process of autobiographical cartooning through retrospective sequencing. Amy has exhibited the work of Daisy and the mermaids regularly, created murals, published in magazines and tabling at zine fairs. Amy is a co-founding member of the Mtns Zine Club (Blue Mountains, Australia).
Amy works as an art therapist at the Katoomba Neurodiversity Hub. In this role, she was invited to facilitate an interactive installation for an exhibition called Sensorial (2023), and has completed a new installation for the traveling Sensorial (2025-2027). This opportunity challenged her to discover and develop large scale artworks, broadening knowledge of textile, carpentry, glue, electronics, upcycling crafts and collaborative art making. Story and world building continue to dominate her work. The experience of developing both of the Sensorial installations grew her practice as an artist and as an art therapist.
About Amy’s Thesis Project
From the abstract to Amy’s thesis project, “Living with Daisy: The Therapeutic potential of cartooning in art therapy“:
In this thesis, I argue that cartooning has the significant potential to be a therapeutic language within the context of art therapy to promote activation of the dynamic field in Schaverien Analytical Art Psychotherapy and support mental health recovery. My research used the framework of heuristic inquiry to explore my own process and experience as an auto-biographical cartoonist. I started with the ‘hypothesis’ that cartooning (as a narrative-art language) promotes a unified development of critical thinking, resilience, and emotional intelligence that supports mental health recovery. To investigate this hypothesis, I analysed a decade of my autobiographical cartooning, with a focus on the role of my alter-ego character named Daisy. Seeking to answer: Can a cohesive narrative be created from retrospectively sequencing single-frame autobiographical cartoons and does the process have therapeutic value?
To support the heuristic process, I structured the theoretical framework by merging Comics Theory and Schaverien theories of image in art therapy. Using this framework, I have found that (1) cartooning images can be simultaneously diagrammatic and embodied; (2) autobiographical cartoons document moments in time and hold new information that becomes illuminated when reviewed retrospectively, within a therapeutic context; and (3) The process involves narrative thinking which engages divergent and convergent thinking concurrently and enables critical thinking and innovative problem solving leading to increased resilience, and emotional intelligence.
Significantly, I have shown the hypothesis to be true and developed a model of my cartooning process I call The Portal and The Path. The model describes my heuristic creative process in cartooning and how the integration of narrative thinking and repeated symbolic narrative – visual language of cartooning aids mental health recovery. The Portal and The Path has potential to be used as a model in art therapy.
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