Dr Carla van Laar

Experience, background and philosophy

Dr Carla is a painter and therapeutic arts practitioner from Australia. Born in Brisbane, Carla is a first-generation Australian on her Dutch grandparents' side, and 7th generation through her maternal bloodline, who were mostly English and came to Australia in the early colonisation of the 1800s. Her mother grew up in remote North Queensland and most of her extended family still live up North.

Carla currently lives and works in Boon Wurrung Country in the South Eastern coastal town of Inverloch, paying deep respects to the First Peoples of the Kulin Nations whose land was never ceded and will always be Aboriginal land.

Identifying as a cishet woman, Carla is passionately disinterested in socially constructed identities that disempower anyone. Carla has over 25 years’ experience working with people and the arts for health and well-being in community organisations, justice, health and education contexts.

Carla’s first book, “Bereaved Mother’s Heart”, was published in 2007 and broke social taboos about maternal grief. From 2008 to 18, she established and ran an independent art therapy studio and gallery in Melbourne. Her Doctoral research, “Seeing Her Stories”, continues the mission to make women’s stories visible through art.

Carla has worked as an Art Therapy educator at several training institutions since 2001. She is a practising artist and in 2018 received an Artist Fellowship at RMIT’s creative research lab, “Creative Agency”. She insists on being part of a creative revolution in which art re-embodies lived experience, brings us to our senses, makes us aware of the interconnectedness of all life and is an agent of social change.

Carla’s book “Seeing her stories” presents her Doctoral research into making unseen stories visible through art. It was published in 2020 and is available to read for free on this website under the Seeing Her Stories menu.

Carla has lived experience as the parent of a child with disabilities and a life-limiting condition, and it was during her beloved son Vaughn’s life that she was introduced to the life-enhancing potential of creative arts therapies. She has worked with people who have disabilities since 1991 and continues this supportive 1:1 work today in her Inverloch-based Art Therapy studio.

Experiential ways of knowing underpin Carla’s therapeutic work, including embodied attunement and arts-based responding, informed by trauma-centred, strengths-based, existential and narrative approaches. She loves to share creative practices as ways of knowing and being.

Carla is driven by a belief that the values underpinning arts-based practice are essential for healing our troubled world. She has authored two books and multiple articles.

Carla currently works with NDIS participants, war veterans, families affected by violence, and other creative help-seekers and provides online supervision for practitioners around Australia. She regularly gets involved in creative projects that ignite her interest.

Carla is the Founding Director of the Creative Mental Health Forum and Collective Care Retreat, and Convenor of the Psychotherapy and Counselling Federation of Australia (PACFA)’s College of Creative and Experiential Therapies (CCET).