Abstract

This study examines the creation of performance art as a transformative therapeutic approach with persons who harm their own bodies. In order to explore potential avenues of this embodied therapeutic approach, the artist/researcher created a performance piece entitled "Borderland". The piece represents a hermeneutic 'dialogue' between the literature on self-mutilation and performance art and the researcher's own subjective and embodied creative process. A premise of this study is that in both performance art and the act of self-mutilation the body is the 'borderland' between inner and outer realms. The body is also the prime means of communicating and making direct and tangible contact with both the self and the other. This 'borderland' will be linked to the transitional space of ritual which both the performance artist and the self-mutilator creates, in part, to connect with, and integrate, lost dissociated parts of the self.