Holding Space Through Art

My Journey Into Therapeutic Practice

I am Raghavi.

Artist | Designer | Researcher | Art Therapy Practitioner.

And for a long time, I didn't know these were all the same thing.

Before I had a name for it

The Origin Story

Long before I understood the theories behind art as a healing practice, I found myself drawing mandalas. Not for exhibitions. Not for anyone to see. Just because the repetition of circular forms one ring, then another, then another helped me breathe. It helped me manage the restlessness of OCD, the low hum of anxiety that I carried without always knowing what to do with it.

I also folded paper. Origami. The precision of each crease, the commitment to the sequence there was something deeply calming about a process that required your full attention and rewarded patience. I didn't know it then, but I was already practising art therapy on myself.

During the COVID pandemic, while living in New York, I watched creativity become a quiet source of resilience for people around me. Through screens, through distance, through profound uncertainty art helped people find each other. It gave shape to grief. It gave texture to hope. I began to understand that art has a power far beyond galleries and exhibitions. It allows people to communicate what words alone cannot hold.

That realisation led me here.

What I do, and why it matters to me

The Practice

Through my Art Therapy Diploma, I worked with groups who rarely have space held for them — minor girls recovering from trafficking and abuse, young women in drug rehabilitation, homemakers in their 50s and 60s who quietly wept when asked to draw their inner room, because no one had ever asked them what they wanted before.

These experiences shaped everything. They taught me that art therapy is not about technique. It's about presence. It's about creating a space safe enough for a person to pick up a leaf from a garden, arrange it on paper, and feel - perhaps for the first time in a long time - that they are making something that belongs to them.

I now work with individuals navigating burnout, stress, and life transitions. I work with organisations that care about their people.

And I continue to work - pro bono, wherever I can - with the vulnerable communities who first taught me what this practice is really for.

Art, design, and the responsibility they carry

The researcher & designer

I am also a designer and researcher. My MFA in Textiles from Parsons School of Design in New York gave me a deep fluency in materials, process, and the relationship between the hand and the mind.

My ongoing PhD in Sustainable Design at the National Institute of Design, Ahmedabad, asks me to think about how creative practice can be responsible to people, to the environment, to truth.

These are not separate parts of my life. They inform everything. My art therapy work is grounded in research. My research is grounded in lived human experience. My creative practice — in textiles, drawing, origami, and participatory art — is the thread that weaves them all together.